Red Bluff
by inkstainedfingers97
Summary: "I'll come by your place tonight. We'll talk it out, okay?" A soft, sad look in his eyes. "You're sweet." "Let me help you," she pleaded. The doors closed in her face. She gave him a five minute head start, and then went after him.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Uh. This is kind of an epic... buckle yourselves in for a long ride. Bit of a departure from my usual fare, as I have attempted an actual plot. This was inspired by the promo for 4x24, but does not follow the events of that episode. Goes AU immediately after 4x23.

Spoilers: Up through 4x23.

Rating: T

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, and I'm certainly not making any money off them.

xxx

"Jane, don't do anything rash. We can work this out. We'll fix it."

He smiled wryly. "I doubt that."

"I'll come by your place tonight. We'll talk it out, okay?"

A soft, sad look in his eyes. "You're sweet."

"Let me help you," she pleaded.

And then the doors closed in her face.

xxx

She gave him a five minute head start, and then went after him.

She went to the motor pool and signed out a CBI issue vehicle. She chose the most common, nondescript one they had available, not wanting to alert him to her presence with the usual black SUV's the team normally used. Jane could spot a tail a mile away, and he definitely seemed to have a sixth sense as far as she was concerned, so if she was going to have any hope of figuring out where he was going, she'd have to be beyond discreet.

She took a risk and guessed that he'd headed west on 18th street; it fed to most of the major interchanges, so there was a fair chance he'd go that way unless he was going somewhere really obscure.

Her guess paid off. She caught sight of his Citroen heading towards the onramp for Highway 50. She stayed well back, not allowing herself the luxury of worrying if she lost sight of the car for a few moments, and keeping her fingers crossed that she'd see it when he exited.

She did. He pulled off after only a few miles and when she recognized the neighborhood she dropped back even further, surprised and perplexed.

Ten minutes later, she pulled up behind the extended stay motel he'd been sleeping at as long as she'd known him. His car was in its usual parking place. She sat in her car, considering. She'd told him she would come to his place, and here he was. She hadn't expected this. She'd thought… well, she'd had no idea what he was going to do, but she thought if she followed him she could figure it out and try to stop him. Surely, he had some plan of action, some scheme in the works. Yet here he was, exactly where she'd told him she'd look for him. Was it possible that he actually planned to allow her to help him?

She dismissed the thought. No. She'd seen the look on his face. He had no intention of letting her anywhere near the toxic mess he had created. Had he known she was tailing him and come here so she wouldn't find out his true purpose- his next move? Would it be better to wait for him to leave again so she'd have some idea of what he was planning to do?

She sighed, resigned. If he had noticed her following him, he was hardly going to just wait for her to go away. He knew her better than that.

She got out of the car and climbed the steps to the second floor, her feet feeling heavier than lead. The truth was, she was shaken, and not at all sure of her purpose here. She'd been horrified when she learned he'd buried a man alive, of course—in fact, she was scared beyond reason of what he'd shown himself capable of. How could he do something like that and be so utterly convinced that what he'd done was right?

But in a way, what he'd done to Wainwright was almost worse. Giving the killer a taste of his own medicine had been an awful, awful thing to do, but at least she could understand his logic, even if she didn't agree with it. But taunting Wainwright like that… it was so pointlessly cruel. He'd deliberately provoked the man, but to what end? She shuddered. Wainwright was young, yes, but he wasn't a bad person. He wasn't even a bad boss, even if he was inexperienced. But Jane had gone after him mercilessly, his eyes cold as he'd mocked the younger man as only Jane could, honing in on the one thing that he knew would push the other man over the edge, the thing that no one else would ever see or acknowledge. If she knocked on his door right now, would he do the same to her? He knew her so well. She had no doubt he could destroy her with a few carefully chosen words, if he had half a mind to. Given the current state he was in, she feared that he wouldn't hesitate to do so if she got in his way.

But the alternative was to walk away and leave Jane to his own devices, alone with his own dark thoughts. And she simply wasn't willing to do that.

She raised her fist to pound on the door, but it opened before she had the chance to knock, and he stepped outside, clearly on his way back out.

He looked surprised to see her. "Lisbon." He hesitated. "I thought you were coming by later."

She wasn't sure if she was distressed or relieved that he was so out of sorts that she could actually see that she'd taken him by surprise. Jane never betrayed mundane emotions like surprise. She was convinced that if he ever actually experienced the emotion, he was accustomed to lying to make it seem like he hadn't—"Lisbon, I knew it was him all along. It was obvious from the outset the butler did it." Yeah, right. But the fact that he was so distracted by whatever the hell was going on in his head that he hadn't noticed her tailing him, or hadn't guessed that she was going to, was in the end more disturbing than comforting.

"Yet here you are on your way out," she said flatly.

"Yes, I was going to come back later."

"You're lying," she said coldly. "You were not going to come back. You were going to disappear and leave me to worry myself sick over where you'd gone and what you might be doing."

His mouth tightened into a thin line. "You shouldn't have come."

"What the hell? Of course I was going to come, you jackass!" she exploded. "You knew I was going to come, and that's why you were leaving, so you wouldn't have to face me, you coward."

He ignored this. "You're getting to be a better liar, Lisbon. My congratulations are in order. I believed you when you said you'd be coming by later."

"That's because I wasn't lying, you son of a bitch," she said through clenched teeth. "I meant what I said. But as soon as I saw the look on your face when I said it, I knew that you were going to make damn sure you weren't around when I showed up."

"Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason for that?" he nearly shouted. "That I had a plan, which you are now screwing up beyond belief, you infuriating woman!"

Not for the first time in her life, Lisbon was sorely tempted to deck him. "Of course I knew you had a plan. And you know what? I don't even know what it is, but I know that it's a bad one, because Red John is involved, and you go crazy every time he's in the picture. You have a blind spot a mile wide when it comes to him, Jane, and there's no way I'm going to let you get yourself killed by that psychopath just because you were too stubborn to stop and listen to reason for once in your goddamned life!"

Jane took a deep breath, clearly struggling to maintain a semblance of his usual calm. "All right. It's clear we aren't going to resolve this by shouting at each other out here. If we must talk about this, can we please do it inside?"

"Like mature adults?" Lisbon said sarcastically.

"If you like. I was thinking more along the lines of away from prying eyes," he muttered.

A chill went down her spine. "You think you're being watched?"

"Tan van, near the third streetlight on the right," he said in a low voice. "Don't look right away. Wait ten seconds, then hit me on the shoulder and angle your body so you can take a look without drawing attention."

Lisbon did as he said. She didn't even feel bad when he winced when she hit him on the shoulder. The bastard deserved it. He was right about the van, though. There was a Caucasian man sitting idly in the driver's seat who could have been anywhere between his early thirties and late forties. She doubted she'd be able to identify him in a lineup from her brief glimpse of him- he was too far away, and he was wearing a hat and sunglasses which obscured most of his face. "Shit."

"Yes." Jane gestured for her to enter his room, and she did so, keeping a wary eye on him lest he take the opportunity to lock her inside and bolt from the scene.

He didn't, however. He closed the door behind him and ran a hand through his hair, looking weary. A pang shot through her chest at the sight of him. God, he was maddening. Why couldn't he see this would be so much easier if he just let her help him?

"Do you think the place has been bugged?" she said in a low voice.

He shook his head. "No. I swept it before. It's clean."

She nodded, accepting his word on the matter. If it were anyone else, she would insist on double checking, but she knew Jane would have checked the place thoroughly. He'd have thought of the most likely and unlikely possible places for a bug, and he was so tuned to his surroundings he would have noticed even the slightest difference from the norm. But if he was being watched… this was even more serious than she'd imagined.

She put the tan van out of her mind and focused on her more immediate concern. She folded her arms across her chest. "What's going on, Jane?"

He scrubbed his hand over his face but didn't answer.

She tried a different tack. "Where were you going, just now?"

"Out for a pack of cigarettes," he spat at her.

Okay, obviously he wasn't going to tell her. She considered the possibilities. Why had he come back here? He hadn't realized she was following him, so it wasn't to throw her off his scent. He must have come back here for something specific. To pick something up, probably. It had to be small, because he hadn't been carrying any luggage or anything when she caught him coming out of his room. Which meant it must be hidden on his person somewhere.

Lisbon had had enough of asking nicely. She was going to get answers from him whether he cooperated or not. She stepped towards him, a predatory glint in her eye.

His eyes widened. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing you need to worry about," she tossed back at him, continuing to advance towards him.

He stepped back hastily, but she was quicker than him, and with one more step, she was able to close the distance between them.

She reached out and slid her hands up to grab the lapels of his jacket, pulling him closer to her. She could feel the warmth of his body radiating against hers.

"Lisbon?" His voice was calm, but she could see his pulse point jumping in the hollow of his throat. Master of biofeedback, her ass.

"Jane," she said, meeting his eyes. "Believe me when I tell you that what I'm about to do is for your own good."

And then she hooked her foot behind his ankle and took him down with one swift move.


	2. Chapter 2

She tumbled down with him, of course. That move was designed to end with both combatants on the ground, but she knew her next move. She rolled easily as they fell and flipped him over onto his stomach before he knew what was happening. The next part was a bit harder, and it wasn't particularly dignified for either of them, but after a few minutes, she was able to wrestle his jacket off him while keeping him pinned beneath her. He struggled valiantly, but Lisbon hadn't gotten as far as she had in her profession without knowing how to effectively subdue an opponent significantly larger than herself. She yanked his arms free of the sleeves and then plopped herself down on the middle of his back to keep him from squirming free while she examined her prize.

She rifled through the pockets… and was completely dismayed by what she found.

She let the jacket fall to the side and stood slowly, staring at the objects in her hands in shock. Ten thousand dollars and six fake ids, three of them passports for other nationalities.

Jane scrambled to his feet, and she looked up at him. "You were planning to leave the country?" she said, hating the vulnerability she could hear in her own voice. "Just like that?"

"No," he said shortly.

"Don't lie to me, Jane. You have three passports here in different names. Looks like a hell of a trip you're planning." Then something else occurred to her. "Are there more?"

Wordlessly, he drew out four more ids from his outside vest pocket, and an additional five thousand dollars from the inside pocket of his vest.

"Jesus, Jane," she breathed.

He sighed. "I wasn't planning on leaving the country." Off her incredulous look, he held up a staying hand. "Truly. I just thought I ought to be prepared."

"For *what?*"

He didn't meet her eyes. "I don't know."

"But you were planning on leaving town," she said flatly.

He met her eyes then. "Yes. That part is true."

"And you weren't going to tell me. You were just going to let me show up and let me be scared out of my mind of what you might be doing or that something might have happened to you."

His jaw tightened. "Yes."

She raised her eyebrows at him. "For my own good, right?" Hopefully her little display a moment ago had given him some insight into how pleasant it was when other people decided what was best for you.

He glared at her. "Yes." Well, he'd definitely gotten her point, even if he was still being obstinate about it.

"Where were you going to go?"

"Away from here."

"Jane, you stubborn ass, get it through your thick head that I'm not going to leave you alone until you tell me exactly what it is you're planning. If I have to, I will chain myself to you, throw away the key, and make sure you don't have so much as a paperclip or a shoelace within spitting distance to get yourself out. So cut the crap and tell me what the hell is going on."

He regarded her for a long moment and she looked straight back into his eyes, refusing to back down.

She saw the moment she won. His shoulders slumped ever so slightly and a look of defeat flickered over his drawn features. And she knew suddenly that of all the battles she'd engaged in with Jane, this was the most important one she'd ever fought, and she had won. She was pretty sure it signaled a turning point in the war. This was Waterloo, and she was the Duke of Wellington. For years, he'd blown her off with a clever turn of phrase or a diversion and a quick escape, and the count of her losses had grown steadily higher, but when it really mattered, she'd won with brute force and sheer stubbornness. He was going to tell her what he knew.

All in all, she was quite pleased.

Well, no, she wasn't pleased, because Jane had lied to her (so what else was new) and he was trying to skip town *without even telling her* and she *still* had no idea what was going on, and Red John was involved so that pretty much certainly meant something awful had happened or was about to happen… but it was going to be okay, because this time she wasn't going to let him run off and try to handle everything by himself. She was going to stick with him, dammit, whether he liked it or not.

Jane sighed. "Let's sit down, okay?" he said, gesturing to the bed.

They sat, and Jane was quiet for a long moment.

Lisbon waited.

Finally, Jane said, "Red John wants me to be one of his disciples."

Lisbon was on her feet again before her brain had even fully processed his words. "*What?*"

Jane didn't get up. "Red John wants me to be one of his disciples."

She stared at him. "What the hell do you mean, he wants you to be one of his disciples?"

Jane shrugged. "Presumably, it means he wants to train me to cut people up on his behalf. Or at the very least murder key witnesses when it looks like they might roll over on him. He doesn't seem to be too particular about the methods his lackeys employ, as long as they get the job done."

Lisbon's mind was flashing through the events of the past few days, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. "Did he contact you?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Just… start from the beginning."

"It started with the little girl. Hailey. She said he asked if I gave up yet. And then she said he wanted to know if I was familiar with the phrase, 'If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

"You didn't tell me that before."

"No. I didn't."

Lisbon was forcibly reminded of him saying those words to her after she'd asked him if he'd helped Erica Flynn escape, and she wanted to hit him. She was ninety percent sure he *hadn't* helped her, and just didn't want to admit that the woman had outwitted him. That ten percent nagged at the back of her mind, though, and it still galled that he had refused to tell her one way or another. But then, Jane never had shown much indication that her peace of mind was particularly important to him. "Why the hell not?"

"What, did you expect me to just blurt something like that out to Wainwright, of all people?"

"You could have told me after," she said stubbornly. "God." She ran her hand through her hair as the pieces clicked into place. "You knew this all along. Before you locked Marx in the coffin. Before you unloaded on Wainright." She stopped. "Wainwright. I knew there was something off about that whole thing. You did it on purpose. You manipulated him into firing you. You've been *planning* to leave."

He looked at her curiously. "How did you know? About Wainwright, I mean."

"You called him a mama's boy. I don't know, it seemed to lack a certain… sophistication, coming from you."

"Sometimes the crudest methods are the most effective."

"I don't understand. Red John sends you a message through a little girl, that he wants you to join him, and what? You just decided, what the hell, why not?"

"Of course not. I didn't even fully grasp what he was saying at first." He smiled, though it was devoid of humor. "I wasn't exactly at my best. I should have known right away. The message was pretty clear. But I didn't understand until the next day."

"What do you mean?"

He hesitated.

"Tell me," she said firmly.

He sighed. He reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and drew something out of it. Geez. The next time she decided to tackle Jane, she was going to need to be a lot more thorough about searching him. "I found this in on the driver's seat of my car yesterday morning."

It was a photograph. She sat down next to him again and peered over his shoulder so she could look at it more closely.

It was a picture of her and Jane. It was a sweet photograph. They were sitting at a café, sharing an ice cream sundae and laughing together.

Beneath it, there was a caption that read, "You two seem close."

Lisbon's breath caught in her throat. The implication was clear. Red John thought that she and Jane… that Jane and her were…

"It gets worse," Jane informed her. He handed her the photograph. She took it numbly, still processing the meaning of the caption.

Jane nudged her shoulder. "Turn it over," he said wearily.

She obeyed with a sinking feeling in her stomach. Then, it stopped sinking, because what she saw made the bottom of her stomach drop out entirely.

It was another caption. This one read simply: "She'll be a fitting initiation for you."

There was a small red smiley face beneath it, grinning up at her.

"Red John wants me dead," she said tonelessly.

"Well, you've certainly caught his attention," Jane hedged.

"So what's the plan?"

"The plan?"

"Yes. You said you had a plan."

He looked at her sideways. "Truth?"

"Please."

He sighed. "The plan was to get as far from Sacramento as possible and figure out what the hell to do."

Her eyes narrowed. "Let me get this straight. You figured out Red John is planning to have me killed, and your response is to leave town and just let him take his best shot?"

"Of course not! Aren't you paying attention, woman? Red John's only interest in you is in using you to get to me. If I'm out of the picture, he'll stay away from you."

"Right. It's always all about you. The fact that I'm the lead agent on his case has nothing to do with him wanting me dead."

"Look at that photo, Lisbon! He doesn't care that you're investigating him— he's only threatening you because he thinks I have feelings for you."

Their eyes met and there was a moment of crackling tension between them while they both considered the implications of this—and how close to the truth Red John might have been with his guess.

For once, Jane looked away first. "Anyway, the point is, it doesn't look like he wants to kill you himself."

"No, he wants you to do it for him," Lisbon said. "Gee, that makes me feel so much better."

He frowned. "It's weird, isn't it?"

"What, that Red John wants to kill me?"

"No, that he actually thinks I would kill you. I mean, obviously he knows how I get about the women I—" he stopped. "He must know I would never hurt you. So why would he threaten you in this particular way?"

The women he-? Lisbon pushed the thought from her mind and focused on the matter at hand. "You think it would be better if he sent someone else after me? At least if you came at me, I could just shoot you. If it was a stranger I might not be able to see them coming."

He ignored her. "It's a test."

"A test?"

"Yes. He wants to know if you are worth more to me than my revenge. And then once he's established that, he will try to figure out how to best use that information against me. Probably by kidnapping you and using you as leverage to get me to do what he wants."

"What does he want you to do?" Lisbon asked, avoiding the issue of whether her life was in fact worth more to him than his quest for revenge. Frankly, she was afraid to hear the answer.

He stood up and started pacing. "How should I know? To break my will, maybe. Maybe he thinks if he kills you, that might finally do it. And then he'd be able to turn me. It's certainly a new element to the game. A new challenge for him."

Lisbon looked down at her hands. "Some game." She glanced out the open curtains to give her an excuse to continue avoiding his gaze and froze. There was a glint of light winking back at her. Sunlight reflecting off a glass surface. Which appeared to be coming from a telephoto lens in the hands of the man in the van Jane had pointed out earlier. Great. He was taking photos of them to send back to Red John. This day just kept getting better and better.

Jane was oblivious. "Clearly, what I have to do is to prove to Red John that you mean less to me than him."

"Well, that shouldn't be too difficult," Lisbon muttered.

He looked at her sharply. "Lisbon, tell me you don't honestly think I care more about my revenge than I do about your life."

"I never know with you!" she burst out. "That's the point. You put so much effort into fooling Red John, you forget you do a pretty good job fooling the people who are supposed to be your friends, too. Because you *never tell us anything.* For God's sake, you hit a man with a shovel and locked him in a coffin to suffocate to death. So no, Jane, I *don't* know that you care more about my life than you do for your revenge."

"That's completely different. He was an evil murderer who deserved what he got," Jane said coldly.

"If you're willing to cross that line, how am I supposed to know which ones you will or won't cross? What's to say where you'll stop?"

"You really think so little of me? I had to do something extreme to show Red John that I'm more ruthless than he thinks I am. Marx was just a conveniently deserving outlet for that need. And I let him out before he suffocated, so I don't see what the problem is."

"How the hell is you convincing Red John that you're more ruthless than he thinks you are supposed to help anything?"

"Obviously, he's aware of your role in my life. He's the sort of man who would have made it his business to learn as much about you as possible. Presumably he's managed to learn enough about your character to know you wouldn't approve of what I did to Marx."

"Again, how is this helpful?"

"Don't you see, Lisbon? I need to prove to him that I don't care about having you in my life. So I do something I know would make you think less of me so he thinks I don't value your opinion of me. Then I get myself fired, demonstrating that I don't care enough about staying near you to toe the line at the CBI. Then when I leave town he sees my attachment to you isn't great enough to be worth exploiting and he won't be able to use it to get me to do his bidding."

"That's the worst plan I've ever heard," Lisbon said flatly. "What happens when you leave town and Red John kidnaps me anyway and threatens to kill me unless you come back? Only no one can reach you because you didn't bother to *tell anyone* where the hell you were going. Because you're so goddamned *secretive* you don't even tell the people you're closest to what is going on in your tiny addled mind!"

"Okay, so there are a few kinks I need to work out. But it will buy me some time to figure out what to do."

"No, it won't," Lisbon said firmly. "Because you're not going through with that ridiculous lack of a plan." She stood up and poked him in the chest to drive her point home. "I'm not letting you run away, Jane. Get used to it."

He ran his hand over his face. "I suppose you have a better idea."

"Yes, I do."

He looked at her warily. "What's that?"

"Obviously, you're going to have to kill me."


	3. Chapter 3

He stared at her. "What?"

She shrugged. "You've done a pretty good job convincing everyone you've gone off the deep end. We might as well carry on with that theme to the end."

"Please explain," he said tightly.

"Red John has pretty much come right out and said he's planning to have me killed. Well, I have no intention of waiting around like a sitting duck until he makes his move. So we'll have to convince him that somebody has beaten him to the punch. If he believes I'm already dead, he'll stop trying to kill me."

"And how exactly do you propose we convince him of that?"

"Look, based on what he wrote on that picture, Red John seems to think that you and I are… romantically involved."

"So?"

"So, we can use that to our advantage."

"How?"

"Well, obviously you don't… handle loss well," Lisbon said delicately.

"Go on," Jane said tightly.

"You're also a control freak."

He ran a hand through his hair. "Is there a point to this character assessment?"

Lisbon went on, undeterred. "We convince Red John that you're getting better. Er. Healing. After all this time. That you're putting the whole thing behind you. He wouldn't like that, would he?"

Jane looked interested for the first time. "No. He wouldn't."

She took a deep breath and said the next part in a rush. "So we persuade Red John you've fallen in love with me."

He didn't blink. "Okay…"

She barreled on quickly. "Presumably, he'll do something else to threaten me to make sure you're still engaged in the game."

His jaw tightened. "Provoking Red John into threatening you again. That's your idea? You're not exactly selling me on this plan so far, Lisbon."

"No, listen. Say he sends another note like the one he wrote on the photograph when he thinks we're in a relationship. You freak out, right?"

"Yes…"

"So you go crazy and shoot me because you'd rather kill me yourself than let Red John get me." Lisbon was rather pleased with herself. Jane wasn't the only one who could come up with insanely complicated and dangerous plans.

He shook his head. "Lisbon. I would never hurt you. Red John knows that."

"Well, you're going to have to convince him otherwise if we want the plan to work. Anyway, so you shoot me-"

"A real highlight of this plan," Jane muttered.

"—And then I pretend to be dead and you get arrested."

"What, you think I couldn't murder you without getting caught?" Jane said, sounding insulted. "I can think of three ways to kill you off the top of my head without anyone knowing it was me."

"You're going to be too emotionally distraught because of the threat on my life to be thinking clearly enough for subtlety," Lisbon told him. She was almost starting to enjoy herself. It was nice being on the other end of the crazy scheme for once. "Besides, we need people to know it was you. That way Red John knows you've gone nuts and can reach out to you or whatever."

"You think Red John is going to reach out to me after I kill you?"

"Yes. You're going to be a mess. If he really wants to turn you, it will be best to approach you when you're grief stricken and emotionally vulnerable. But you'll have to escape from jail before that happens."

He perked up. "I get to escape from jail?"

"Yes. I'll leave the details of that part of the plan to you," she said magnanimously.

"What do I do after I escape from jail?"

She shrugged. "I dunno. Do whatever you think Red John would expect you to do if you had really killed me. It doesn't matter where you go because I'm pretty sure that's when he'll make contact."

"Now you're the expert on Red John and how he thinks?" he said incredulously.

"I've been working this case a long time, Jane. I know as much about the way he works as you do. Only difference is, I don't lose my head every time he rears his ugly head."

"Present circumstances notwithstanding," he said sarcastically.

She glared at him. "It's better than a plan that consists of running away and hoping for the best."

"There are so many things that could possibly go wrong with this plan I don't know where to start."

"As opposed to your plans which always go so smoothly?" she said dryly.

He shook his head. "This is different. It's too dangerous. If one thing goes wrong, Red John could get you."

"But if it goes right, we could catch him. It could finally be over."

He met her eyes and sighed at the determination he saw there. "All right. We'll try it. I can't say I like it, though."

"Nor do I, much," she admitted. "But it seems like the only thing to do that will keep Red John from trying to kidnap one or both of us and cutting us into little pieces, so I say we go for it."

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked deep into her eyes. "We don't have to go through with this, Lisbon. I'll think of another way. I'm willing to walk away if that's what it takes to keep you safe."

She lowered her gaze, unable to keep looking in his eyes when he looked at her like that. "Yeah, well, I'm not willing to let you walk away, so unless you can think of something better, this is all we've got," she said, addressing his top vest button.

He let her go. "So how are we going to convince Red John that I've recovered enough to start a new relationship with you after the display I put on with Wainwright this afternoon?"

Lisbon glanced out the window again. "Yeah, uh, I have an idea about that."

"What idea?"

God, this was going to be so humiliating. Instead of answering him, she stepped forward tentatively and placed her hands against his chest.

He froze. "Lisbon? What are you doing? Are you going to knock me down again? Because I swear, I already showed you everything in my pockets. Well, except for the lockpick set. Never know when that's going to come in handy, but didn't think you'd care too much about that, given the circumstances-"

"Sh," she said quietly. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him softly on the corner of the mouth. She couldn't quite bring herself to give him a real kiss—that would be too weird. Also, not very good for her plan to stay in control of the situation.

She sank back down on her heels and cupped his face in her hand. "Run your fingers through my hair," she told him.

Wonderingly, he raised his hand and obeyed, her hair sliding through his fingers like silk.

She stepped a little closer to him and tilted her head slightly to the side. "Kiss the side of my neck."

He bent forward as though in a trance and pressed his lips to the side of her neck.

Lisbon closed her eyes. Maybe this hadn't been the best idea in the world. Because his mouth was warm against her neck and she was finding it a little difficult to stay focused.

Unbidden, he dropped his head farther and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to her collarbone. Then another to the hollow of her throat, just above where her cross lay against her chest.

She realized her hands were fisted in his vest and forced them to relax. When he lifted his head from her neck she pushed him away ever so slightly and reached for the top button of his vest. She kept her eyes lowered and wished there was a less embarrassing way to go about this whole thing.

He stood there docilely as she slowly unbuttoned his vest and pushed it off his shoulders, letting it flutter to the floor, and then she moved on to his shirt.

He caught her hand as she moved to the button at his throat and she was so startled she forgot to avoid his gaze. His eyes were bluer than normal and looked soft and light. He gave her a small, wry smile, and brought her hand to his lips so he could drop a tender kiss on the inside of her wrist. Her face flamed. She knew that Jane could feel the way her pulse skipped a beat when his lips met her wrist, and she looked down again, busying herself with unbuttoning the rest of his shirt.

She got the shirt unbuttoned, which made her whole 'avoiding eye contact' thing more problematic, because all she could look at was his bare chest. It was pretty nice, for someone who spent 95% of every day lounging on his couch pretending to sleep. She grabbed the edges of his shirt and maneuvered him so he was closer to the bed. Once she'd divested him of the shirt entirely, she pushed him back on the bed with a little more force than was probably strictly necessary.

She looked down at him lying back on the bed, shirtless, and smiled despite herself. At last, she knew what unambiguous surprise looked like on Patrick Jane's face. Before she had too much time to think about what she was doing, she peeled off her own shirt and tossed it to the side. Then she straddled him and settled into his lap.

This was beyond mortifying. She closed her eyes and concentrated on keeping her mind carefully blank. She tossed her head back and sighed, trying to shake all manner of unwelcome thoughts free from her mind. Jane was never going to let her live this down.

Then suddenly her eyes popped open and she looked down at the man in question, surprised to feel the evidence of his body's response to her hard against her.

What she saw startled her even more. He looked back at her, his mouth slightly parted and his eyes pools of black. As she stared at him, shocked, he tentatively reached up and traced a finger down her ribcage and along her bare waist. Gooseflesh appeared in the wake of his finger, and broke out over both her arms as well when he slowed to a stop and settled his hands on her hips.

She was an idiot. Why should she be shocked that he would react the same way any normal man would to having a half naked woman climb onto his lap? Especially since she was pretty sure Jane hadn't, ah, been with anyone in… well, a long time. She was being ridiculous. Of course his body was going to respond. It didn't mean anything. She should ignore it and proceed as she'd originally planned.

She tried not to think about the goosebumps or the look in his eye as she leaned forward and slowly lowered herself so she was laying flat against his chest.

Really, this would have been a thousand times better if she could have just gotten her heart to stop hammering against her chest. She was sure he could feel it, pressed against him as she was. He slowly brought his hand up to her hair and stroked it softly as she lay with her head resting against his chest. She took several deep breaths to calm herself, and then she eased herself off him.

He turned towards her once she was laying down on the bed beside him, slightly wild eyed and seemingly unable to catch her breath.

He propped himself up on one elbow and brought his hand to her hair again. "Teresa? Are you okay?"

"Sure," she managed. "Fine."

He frowned, evidently reading in her face that she certainly was not fine, and moved to sit up.

She grabbed his arm and tugged him down beside her. "Don't get up yet," she whispered.

"Why not?" he whispered back. He put his hand on her bare hip again and she closed her eyes. How was she supposed to stay focused when he was so damned *distracting?*

"Camera," she told him. "Red John's man. He has a telephoto lens."

Jane's whole body went still. "What?"

"You should wait a few minutes, then get up and close the curtains. I don't think he can see us when we're down here on the bed, but if you raise your head much above a foot above the bed, he has a pretty clear shot."

She leaned over and picked up the phone by his bed and dialed out, taking care to make sure she wasn't visible from the window. "Hey, Rigs, it's me. I need you to get eyes on a tan van out at a hotel in west Sacramento. I'm not sure how long it's going to be here but I need you to watch him while he stays in the parking lot and then follow him when he leaves, okay? And it is really important that you aren't seen, all right? I'm serious. If it comes down to losing him or having him notice you, I want you to let him go. … Great. Thanks. I'll call you a little later to get the status."

She hung up the phone and looked back at Jane, who was still gaping at her. "You might want to take off your pants," she said helpfully. "I imagine things would have progressed that far, by this point."

Jane gave her an inscrutable look and toed off his shoes and socks, and then wriggled out of his pants. Then he got up and went to the window. Before closing the curtains, however, he paused and turned back to look at her lying on his bed in her bra and jeans. His eyes swept up and down her body and seemed to come to rest on the freckles on her chest.

"What are you doing?" Lisbon demanded, uncomfortable under his scrutiny.

He raised his eyebrows. "Just creating a new room in my memory palace," he said mildly. He kept his eyes on her long enough to see that her whole body flushed in response to this comment, and then he turned away from her and switched the curtains closed.

Once there was no more light peeking through the gap, Lisbon sat up. "Do you think he bought it?" she asked anxiously.

Jane smiled half-heartedly and came back to sit on the bed beside her. "You were very convincing."

"Oh, good," Lisbon said, relieved. She got up and grabbed her t-shirt from the floor and pulled it over her head. "You know I'm terrible at that sort of thing. I thought my heart was going to beat right out of my chest."

Jane stayed on the bed, still clad only in his boxers. "Did you really do all that to fool Red John's man?"

"Well, yeah," Lisbon said, surprised. "That's kind of the whole point, isn't it?"

He looked away. "Yeah."

Lisbon stared at him. He hadn't thought she was really going to have sex with him, had he?

Surely not. It didn't matter, though, because she realized she'd hurt his feelings. Uncertain how to react to this revelation, she sat down on the bed next to him and reached out to take his hand. "Jane. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

He looked down at their joined hands for a moment before drawing his away. "No matter," he said brightly. "It's good you were thinking on your feet."

"Jane, I—"

"We have a lot of details to work out," he interrupted her. "We should probably get started, don't you think?"

Lisbon gave up, and they started to plan.


	4. Chapter 4

Lisbon discovered that her ideas, like Jane's, didn't always go according to plan.

It had been weeks, and Red John had not contacted them again. The tan van had been a dead end. Rigsby and Van Pelt had been forced to give up their pursuit of the vehicle when it turned into an old warehouse district because continuing to follow it in the abandoned area would have been too conspicuous. Lisbon and the team went through the motions of trying to trace the photograph back to Red John, but weren't surprised when nothing came of it.

The part that went least according to plan was her interaction with Jane during this time.

Jane, she concluded, was a far better actor than she'd given him credit for. She'd always known he was good, but this was a whole new level.

He was a very attentive fake boyfriend. He seemed to orbit around her. Which, she realized uneasily, he'd sort of always done, but now he did so to an even greater extent. He hovered by her side while she issued orders to the team, stood too close when she interviewed suspects, and practically wouldn't walk anywhere these days without his hand at the small of her back. He chose to nap in her office, forsaking his battered leather couch in favor of the plush white one in her office more often than not. The real problem was that Lisbon was having trouble distinguishing between reality and the illusion they were manufacturing for Red John.

It was even worse when they were off duty. He took her hand in his the minute they left the CBI, and kept a possessive hold of it, his fingers threaded through hers. He toyed with the ends of her hair and rested his hand on her knee when they sat next to each other, kissing her temple or on the top of the head.

Once he swept all of her hair over her shoulder and pressed a gentle kiss on the side of her neck.

She'd gone stock still. She was sure he was cataloging the hitch in her breathing and the way her pulse kicked up at the touch of his lips on the sensitive skin at the curve of her neck. But remembering ordering him to do this same thing that night in Jane's motel room, she bit her tongue and let him do it. Payback was a bitch, especially when delivered by someone with Jane's particular sense of humor.

To add to the confusion, their sleeping arrangements had… evolved. Lisbon had spent the night at Jane's hotel that first night to give credence to their image as a newly minted couple, but she was secretly glad to have an excuse to stay and make sure he didn't sneak off into the night with his fake ids and fifteen thousand dollars.

Jane had lent her a pair of expensive looking blue pajamas to sleep in. Once she put them on, she was positively swimming in them, but they smelled good and she didn't complain. Jane slept beside her still only in his boxers, which she found distracting. She was reasonably certain that this was his version of payback for her little lap dance earlier. Surely the man owned at least *one* t-shirt.

She had woken up with Jane's chin crooked over her shoulder and his arm flung over her waist. Which was fine. What wasn't fine—well, okay, it wasn't exactly bad, but it was confusing as hell—was that after that, they'd tacitly agreed to continue sleeping in the same bed, even when they were at Lisbon's apartment and theoretically he could have slept on the couch. They never discussed this, it simply was. Jane had insisted that they spend every night together until they caught Red John. "He'd never believe that I would willingly let you out of my bed, once I got you there, my dear," he informed her. "Besides, I'll feel better if you're close and I can keep an eye on you." Lisbon had closed her hanging jaw and nodded her assent. After that, they'd gone home together every night, and woke up tangled together every morning, all without speaking of this not-completely-necessary-to-the-con arrangement.

They decided to act as though there were eyes on them at all times. After all, they couldn't be sure that there weren't. They swept Jane's hotel and Lisbon's apartment for bugs every time they came home at the end of the day. They didn't see the tan van or its driver again, but they could never be sure where Red John's eyes and ears were. Fortunately, they never found any bugs at either of their places, or in Lisbon's office, so they could continue to speak freely to each other when no one else was around. Lisbon was profoundly grateful for this. She would have gone crazy before a week was out if she'd had to watch what she said to Jane every minute of every day. Ironically, given how much aggravation he normally caused her, at the moment, the only time she could truly relax was when she was alone with Jane. Still, the constant vigilance was putting a strain on both of them, though her more than Jane. He seemed to mind it more for her sake than anything else.

It was sort of a relief that they didn't have to pretend that everything was going perfectly smoothly between the two of them. Neither of them were really the type for hearts and candy romance (though she suspected Jane at least could have done a creditable job of pretending to be, if it suited his purpose), so it wouldn't come as a surprise to Red John that they didn't seem to be going through a honeymoon period common to most new relationships, Jane's touchy feeliness aside. The very real threat to Lisbon's life would account for any other tension between them, but that was only part of the whole truth.

They certainly spent a lot of time together. They slept at each other's places every night. He came over to her apartment and cooked her dinner, and they talked and laughed and fought just like they always did. But they weren't entirely at ease with one another. Jane, far from being his usual detached and aloof self, had become downright clingy, touching her constantly and refusing to let her out of his sight for longer than ten minutes at a time. Lisbon, who had spent the majority of her adult life accustomed to having peaceful solitude whenever she wanted it, chafed at the constant contact and had a tendency to grow irritable and snappish when she was feeling exasperated with his overprotectiveness and annoyed at her own inability to remain unaffected by his constant caresses.

Things came to a head about three weeks after Lisbon had first spent the night at Jane's motel. She found out he'd engineered their latest bust to keep her out of harm's way. This wouldn't have been a problem, if it hadn't left Rigsby exposed to a murderer with a gun without proper backup.

Lisbon was furious. She couldn't believe him. Couldn't believe that he would be so colossally stupid as to try to keep her, the team leader, safe, at the expense of the rest of the team. The team leader was supposed to be the one who took the first hit. She yelled at Jane for twenty solid minutes once they were back in her office, and Jane, unrepentant, listened with an obvious lack of remorse which only added to the intensity of her rage.

She exhaled deeply, trying to calm herself down so she wouldn't end this impossible game with Red John by killing Jane herself. "Rigsby could have been killed because of what you did, Jane. Why doesn't that seem to be penetrating your thick head?"

Jane waved his hand dismissively. "Rigsby's a big boy. He can take care of himself."

Lisbon gritted her teeth. "He's not bullet proof. The suspect had a gun and a clear shot."

"He was wearing a bullet proof vest," Jane pointed out. "Richards would have had to be a pretty good shot to have been able to do any lasting damage."

"Or a bad one," Lisbon shot back. "Kevlar doesn't protect you from a bullet in the head or from bleeding out from a shot to the arm or leg."

"I don't see why you're so upset, Lisbon. We caught the bad guy and no one was hurt, so everything worked out in the end."

"*This* time. Can't you see that it undermines my authority when you do things like this behind my back?"

He gestured impatiently. "Don't be ridiculous, Lisbon. No one on the team doubts your authority."

She ignored him. "I'm responsible for keeping the agents under my supervision safe, Jane. Why don't you get that?"

"And they are all safe, so you can congratulate yourself on a job well done."

Lisbon gave up. "Whatever." She grabbed her bag from the drawer in her desk and slung it over her shoulder.

Jane straightened, suddenly at full attention. "What are you doing?" he said sharply.

"I'm tired," she said shortly. "I'm going home."

He stood up. "Very well. I'll drive."

She held up a hand to forestall him. "Look, maybe we should take a night off from this whole thing." She gave him a weak smile. "We're probably about due for our first fight, anyway."

"No way," Jane said angrily. "I'm not letting you go home by yourself."

"You're not 'letting' me do anything. I'm going home by myself, plain and simple."

"Like hell you are. You're crazy if you think I'm leaving you open to attack from Red John for even one night."

"Jane, I've told you a thousand times, I'm a cop. I can protect myself. What are you going to do if he breaks into my apartment at night anyway, charm him to death?"

He set his jaw. "I'll do whatever it takes. Now, come on, let's go."

She didn't speak to him the entire ride home.

They got ready for bed in silence, still fuming at one another, but by the time they actually climbed in bed, Lisbon felt the fight drain from her. She stared at the ceiling. "I just… I hate it when you lie to me," she said quietly.

There was a long pause as he, too, stared at the ceiling. "I thought he would go the other way."

She turned towards him. "What?"

"Richards. I noticed him looking at you when we interviewed him earlier. I thought if he believed you were around the side, he would run that way and try to take you out. I didn't think he'd try to get into the barn."

"He was trying to get to the horses," Lisbon said.

"What did he think, this is the Old West? Did he really think he was going to be able to escape on some old nag from his grandmother's farm?" Jane said, sounding indignant.

Lisbon rolled her eyes. "He was probably just trying to create a diversion by letting all the horses out of the stables so we wouldn't notice him cutting across the field to get to the Jeep on the other side of the property."

He reached out and took her hand in his. He dropped a kiss on the palm of her hand and then placed it over his heart, trapping it there. "I can't risk anything happen to you," he said simply.

Her anger had cooled considerably by this point. Something had shifted inside her when she'd realized he wasn't going to leave her alone when she was doing everything in her power to drive him away. This should have made her angrier, but inexplicably, she found his refusal to leave her when they were both spitting mad at each other oddly reassuring. She realized this was as much of an apology as she was ever going to get from him and decided to let him off the hook. "You're an idiot," she said, with a familiar mix of exasperation and affection.

He turned his head on the pillow and smiled lazily at her. "Is this the part where we kiss and make up?" he said, eyes twinkling.

She pulled her hand free and punched him in the arm, but she couldn't hide her grin.

Jane winced. "Ow."

They both went to sleep smiling.


	5. Chapter 5

It was easier after that. Lisbon found it easier to relax into his touch and she realized she really didn't miss her solitude that much when Jane was there to tease and laugh with her. They were both on edge about the whole Red John thing, of course, but Lisbon, at least, was cautiously optimistic that their plan would actually work. At this point, it was just the waiting that was killing her.

She said as much to Jane one day when they were in a park down the street from the CBI headquarters.

They'd taken to walking down there often on their lunch breaks, trying to keep their newfound couplehood visible to Red John and any of his helpers that might have been keeping an eye on them without being too obvious at the office. They'd both agreed that if they really had been dating, Lisbon would be likely to want to keep things as professional as possible at work. Jane, it went without saying, would have no such compunctions.

The alleged compromise was their frequent excursions to the nearby park, where Lisbon permitted Jane to hold her hand, touch her, and kiss her neck to his heart's content. This last seemed to have become a favorite activity of his. Lisbon wasn't sure if he really enjoyed it for its own sake or if he just did it to mess with her. She was sure he knew by now that her neck was a particularly sensitive spot for her. Last time he'd done it she'd nibbled on his ear as payback and was gratified to feel him go still beside her in response. Two could play at that game.

On this particular day, however, they were at a détente. They were sitting on a bench looking out over a small pond, Jane's arm around her shoulder and his other hand absently playing with the fingers of her right hand. Lisbon was tired and was resting her head on his shoulder, staring out over the water.

Jane leaned closer to her and kissed her on the top of the head. "What are you thinking?" he asked softly.

She smiled ruefully. "Just thinking that maybe this plan isn't working out after all. We've been at this for weeks and so far we have no idea if Red John is even close to taking the bait."

"Is it such a chore, pretending to be in love with me?" Jane asked lightly.

"I guess not," Lisbon hedged. "I just hate being constantly on my guard. I'm tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know? I want to just get on with the next step."

"It's a long con, Lisbon. Patience is key."

"Yeah, well, patience isn't one of my virtues," Lisbon grumbled.

"You're patient with me," he pointed out.

She blinked and looked up at him. "No, I'm not. I yell at you like five times a day."

"I mean, you haven't given up on me yet."

"Oh." Lisbon blushed. "Well. Someone's got to remind you that you aren't the lost cause you think you are."

"I'm not?"

"You do have a few redeeming qualities, you know."

He grinned. "And what are those?"

She settled her head more comfortably on his shoulder and closed her eyes again. A slight smile graced her lips. "Funny, I can't seem to think of any just at the moment."

"Hey," Jane said, insulted.

"Give me a few minutes," she said lazily. "I'm sure something will come to mind eventually."

"Cruel woman. You're going to pay for that," he growled in her ear.

Lisbon's eyes flew open, recognizing the seriousness of the threat, but it was too late. He'd started to tickle her mercilessly.

"Jane," she gasped between breaths as she tried to stifle the uncontrollable giggles that were escaping her. "Cut—it—out."

She tried to retaliate, but of course the bastard wasn't ticklish. Figured.

Finally she managed to gain the upper hand by grabbing his hands and interlocking her fingers tightly in his so he couldn't wrest them free for another attack.

"Jane, you are the most childish man I've ever met," she informed him. She was still smiling as she said it, however, so her reproof didn't come out quite as sternly as she'd intended it to.

He grinned. "And here I thought you couldn't think of anything positive to say about me."

She rolled her eyes. "I can see that your ego is suffering no lasting damage from my silence on that point."

"My ego does have remarkable powers of recovery," he agreed. "But that's hardly what I'd expect you to focus on in this scenario."

"What do you mean?"

He raised his eyebrows. "How do you know I didn't manipulate the entire conversation to give me an excuse to tickle you?"

She rolled her eyes. He was impossible. "Why would you do that?"

"You don't laugh enough," he informed her. "I would merely have been doing my duty."

"Your duty?"

"Yes, I would certainly be remiss in my duties as your boyfriend if I didn't leave you smiling and happy at the end of our encounters together," he said suggestively.

She blushed and let go of his hands. "I laugh plenty," she said, ignoring the implications of his statement.

He raised his eyebrows. "When was the last time you laughed that hard?"

She thought about it for a moment. "I laughed pretty hard when Ardiles pushed you into that fountain last month. That was really funny."

He scowled. "That was completely uncalled for. Just because I may have suggested he lacked the mental acumen to argue the Braverman case didn't mean he had to ruin a perfectly good suit."

"You took it to the dry cleaners and they said it would be fine."

"Perhaps," he sniffed. "But the silk lining on the vest is ruined forever."

Lisbon laughed and laid her hand on his cheek. "You are ridiculous," she said affectionately.

"It hardly seems ridiculous to be upset by the loss of a perfectly good suit," he protested. "I have a half a mind to sue Ardiles for damages."

Lisbon snorted and let her hand fall back to her side. "Good luck with that."

"You know, what really grates on me is that I didn't see it coming," Jane remarked. "I would never have expected him to lose control in a public place like that. I certainly knew he had the capacity to snap if I pushed him hard enough, but I figured he would have punched me in the privacy of his own office, not shoved me into a public fountain in front of the governor, of all people."

Lisbon chuckled. "Poor Ardiles. You can hardly blame him. You probably give him more grief than the rest of the consultants put together."

"Don't you go start feeling sorry for that cretin. He's an unimaginative drone."

"Well, he helps keep the bad guys in jail, despite the considerable challenges your antics pose to the D.A.'s office."

"By my 'antics,' you mean the way I practically gift wrap the guilty parties for him for almost every case?"

"I was referring more to your complete inability to follow basic rules of criminal procedure. Not to mention your tendency to tamper with evidence and obtain it in ways that make it inadmissible in court," she said dryly.

"Hmph," Jane sniffed. "I can't make it completely easy on him. He's got to do something to earn his paycheck, hasn't he?"

"I don't know. If he decided to start pushing you into fountains or other bodies of waters every time he annoyed you, he could make a pretty good living by charging for tickets. I, for one, would pay good money for the sight of you emerging from the watery depths looking like a drowned rat," she teased him.

He smiled. "As always, I'm glad to have been able to provide some amusement for you, Lisbon."

For once, she allowed herself to act without thinking too deeply about what she was doing, and indulged the urge to reach out her hand to toy with the curls at the back of his neck. "You do a pretty good job of doing that most of the time," she said lightly.

His eyes darkened at her touch. "Do I?"

She nodded, unable to trust her voice to speak when he was looking at her like that.

He brought his own hand up to her face, and addressed her with uncharacteristic seriousness. "You do need to laugh more, Lisbon. When all this is over, I'm going to make it my new mission in life to make you laugh as often as possible."

Her breath caught in her throat. His new mission in life…? What the hell did that mean?

She couldn't absorb what he was saying. She should pull away and laugh off this declaration as the silliness that it undoubtedly was, pretend she didn't believe that he meant whatever it was that he was saying by uttering those words to her, but her traitorous fingers stayed tangled in the curls at the back of his neck, independent of any conscious direction from her brain.

Oh, God. He was so close to her, and moving closer. She seemed to be unable to gather her wits about her to do the sensible thing and move away. Had he hypnotized her? she wondered, a little wildly. No. She defied any woman with a pulse to be able to move away from Patrick Jane when he was looking at her like that. Though maybe that was hypnosis, of a sort…

His eyes dropped to her mouth and she realized belatedly that it looked an awful lot like he was about to kiss her. Granted, it had been awhile, but surely if her brain hadn't been so addled by his nearness, she would have recognized the signs earlier. On the other hand, it was *Jane.* He didn't initiate physical contact with people. Well, except her, lately, but that was different. Right?

Her brain catalogued a thousand reasons this was a phenomenally bad idea in the space of a split second, but still, she didn't move away. Instead, she met his eyes, and leaned forward to meet him.

Something hit her on the back of the head.

Lisbon jerked backwards in surprise. "Ouch!"

"What?" Jane asked, a little desperately. "What is it?" She was relieved to see that he looked at least as disoriented as she felt by the interruption of the moment.

"Something hit my head."

"Are you all right?"

She brought her hand to the back of her head to assess the damage. It was a little tender, but there wasn't any swelling, so it didn't seem too bad. "I think so. It didn't actually hit me that hard. I was more surprised than anything else."

"What was it?"

"I don't know." She looked around to see what could have hit her. Could an acorn have fallen on her head? They weren't sitting under any trees. Had someone thrown a rock at her?

Her eyes came to rest on an object that had fallen beside her on the bench.

It was a tiny white parachute with a small wooden box attached to it. The box was what had hit her on the head before it landed on the bench.

"What's that?" Jane asked, reaching past her to pick it up.

Lisbon seized his wrist, arresting his movement before he could reach it. "Don't touch it."

"Why not?"

"Fingerprints," she said succinctly.

Jane was instantly on high alert. "You think it's from Red John?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the handkerchief he kept there for the odd magic trick. Holding the handkerchief, she gingerly lifted the edge of the parachute to get a closer look at the box.

It was a coffin.

Any doubt Lisbon might have had about the origin of the toy parachute vanished. She was pretty sure she knew what was going to be on the inside, too. She removed the tiny rope attaching the parachute to the box, set the box on her lap, and removed the lid.

Inside it lay a tiny doll, no longer than the length of Lisbon's hand. Handmade, it was perfect down to the last detail. Long, shining black hair, a full red mouth, wide green eyes… it was her. The damn thing even wore a blazer and high heeled boots. The main difference that Lisbon could see between her and her likeness was that she, Lisbon, had all her limbs firmly attached to her body, which could not be said of the doll. The doll had not only been dismembered, but decapitated, the head, body, and limbs all arranged together, but disconnected. The edges of each had been painted red, just to remove any doubt that Red John anticipated a lot of blood when he separated Lisbon's limbs from her body.

Jane took the handkerchief from her and picked up the doll in its coffin. He turned over the coffin lid. A message was inscribed on the underside of it: "Pity you won't be joining me in this endeavor. You know what they say: if you want something done right, do it yourself. I can't be too disappointed… I'm going to enjoy this."

It was about what she'd expected, really. Still, it was an unpleasant shock to the system to receive such an explicit reminder that a serial killer was planning to chop you into small pieces.

This was the plan, she reminded herself. You knew he was going to do something like this. You should be pleased it's working. The coffin and doll were a little over the top, if you asked her, but she supposed serial killers were known for grandiose gestures like these, and Red John certainly had a taste for drama to rival Jane's. The parachute was weird though.

Realization slammed into Lisbon and she stood up suddenly. She whipped out her cell phone and hit the speed dial without looking at it, eyes scanning the park for some sign, some way of telling how Red John had gotten the parachute to land on them at that precise moment.

A voice picked up on the other end of the line. "Hello?"

"Cho, it's me. I need you to call local PD and get them to cordon off everything within a square mile of Discovery Park as soon as possible. Then I need you and the team to come down here and meet me and Jane. We're down by the pond."

"What's going on?"

She took a deep breath. "Red John sent us a message. Just—get here soon, okay?"

"On it," came the terse reply. "I'll be there in ten minutes."

Lisbon turned to Jane, who was staring at Red John's Lisbon doll, with an expression of horror on his face. "Do you see anything?" she asked frantically.

He looked up at her, dazed. "What?"

"Do you see anything?" she repeated.

His eyes refocused on hers. Finally grasping her meaning, he quickly looked around. "No. Nothing stands out. I can't see anyone in our immediate line of sight that looks suspicious. You?"

"Nothing. What about before it landed? Did you see anything then?"

"No," he said again. "What about you?"

"No," she admitted. There was a brief pause where both of them considered the fact that in the moment preceding Red John's untimely delivery, they had been too engrossed in each other to notice anything more subtle than a herd of elephants stampeding past them, but they tacitly agreed to ignore it and move on.

"You think he's here?"

"He has to be. Or at least one of his helpers. He had to have been watching us, to have been able to pinpoint our exact location for his little delivery. How do you think he got the parachute to land on us?"

Jane thought about this for a moment. "Toy helicopter," he said finally.

Lisbon did a double take. "Really?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. It seems like it would do the trick. It would be fairly easy to rig the thing to be able to drop something on someone just at the right moment."

"Wouldn't we have heard it?"

"Not if it was far enough above us. They can go higher than you'd think."

"What's the range on one of those things?"

"About a hundred yards, I'd say."

Lisbon glanced around. "So it would have been pretty easy for someone to have been watching us from the trees over there and use a remote control to drop the parachute on us, and then just walk away through the trees."

"I suppose."

"Hm." Lisbon assessed the landscape once again, and then started striding towards the trees.

Jane grabbed her by the arm and yanked her back. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded.

She shook him off. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm going after him."

"Like hell you are," he said angrily.

"Jane, he's *here.* He can't be more than a few hundred yards away. This is the closest we've ever gotten to him. I have to go after him. If we wait for local PD, he could slip away."

"Did you not see what he just sent us, Lisbon? Do you not get that this is Red John? This isn't some random lowlife you can take down with a flying tackle. And he's after you, Lisbon. You. He's planning to kill you and chop you into tiny pieces."

"Jane, I'm a cop. It's my duty—"

"I don't give a damn about your duty, I'm more concerned with your life."

"I can take care of myself," Lisbon said, for what felt like the thousandth time since she'd met him. "Now let go. I'm going after him."

Quick as flash, he darted towards her and grabbed the gun from her holster. "No, you aren't."

"Jane," she said warningly. "Give me back my gun."

"No."

"Oh, please. What are you going to do to stop me? Shoot me?"

"Even you aren't stupid enough to go after Red John without a gun."

"Now I'm stupid?"

"You're acting pretty stupid right now."

"Jane, we're so close. How can you just let him walk away, after all this time you've dedicated to finding him?"

His jaw was set in a hard line. "I can't let him have you."

Lisbon took a tentative step closer. "He's not going to get me, Jane."

"Not if I can help it," he agreed.

"I know what I'm doing, Jane."

"No, you don't," he said, waving the gun in frustration. "Nobody does, when it comes to Red John."

Lisbon eyed the gun warily. "Jane, calm down and give me the gun."

"I can't calm down, Lisbon. Red John wants you dead. He wants to hurt you. He took everything from me once. I'm not about to let him do it again. He wants to cut you up. Make you bleed. Make you experience more pain than you've ever imagined possible. Haven't you realized by now that whatever Red John sets his sights on, he usually gets?" He brought the gun up to point it at her chest with a shaking hand. "I'd rather kill you myself than let him lay a finger on you, Lisbon."

She rolled her eyes. "For God's sake, Jane, you aren't going to shoot me."

"I would," he said stubbornly. "I'm serious, Lisbon. I would kill you before I let him get his hands on you."

"You're being ridiculous," Lisbon huffed, making a grab for the gun.

He danced away from her, keeping the gun just out of her reach. "You'll have to be quicker than that if you expect to get this gun away from me, Lisbon."

Her eyes narrowed. She should have known it was useless to reason with him. They'd just have to settle for the old-fashioned way of settling disagreements. She tried one more time. "Jane, if you don't give me that gun by the time I count to three, I'm going to take it away from you."

"You can't have it, Lisbon. If you have your gun, you'll go after Red John and he'll get you," Jane said stubbornly.

"One," Lisbon said clearly. "Last chance, Jane."

He backed away from her and she stepped forward determinedly. "Two."

He was about to run for it, she could tell.

To hell with it. She wasn't going to chase Jane all over a public park with him waving her own gun around like a lunatic.

Her muscles coiled like a spring, as she tensed them for what she was about to do.

Jane's eyes widened as he realized what she was doing, but it was too late. Lisbon crashed into him as she launched herself at him full force and tackled him to the ground.

"Three," she grunted as they landed on the grass with a jarring thud.

"You… cheated," Jane panted as he tried to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him.

"And who did I learn that from?" Lisbon panted back as she made another grab for the gun.

He pulled it out of her reach and tried to wriggle out from underneath her, but she wouldn't let him escape.

They grappled on the ground for several more minutes, Lisbon's superior skill and general level of physical fitness counterbalanced by the fact that she'd jammed her shoulder when she tackled him and that Jane was, after all, much bigger than she was, and devilishly clever at spotting her weaknesses. God, they must look like idiots, rolling around in the grass wrestling for a prize like two kids in the school yard, she thought.

A shot rang out.

Lisbon stilled. The battle came to an abrupt halt. They stared at each other in shock for a moment, and then Lisbon glanced down at herself. A pool of red blossomed against her white blouse.

Jane froze. "Lisbon?"

She groaned and slid off him. She landed on the ground next to him with a soft thump and she lay there on her back, gasping quietly.

"Lisbon!" he said again, his voice sharp with alarm. His gaze roamed over her small figure and came to rest on the dark stain on her shirt.

"No," he whispered. "No, Lisbon, no!" He looked down at the gun in his hand in quiet horror and threw it away as if it were a poisonous object. He turned his attention to the woman beside him. "Lisbon?" His voice was pleading now, his tone begging her to tell him that what he feared couldn't be true. He knelt beside her. He touched her side hesitantly and his hand came away sticky and red.

"S'okay, Jane," she slurred. "Not your fault."

He shook his head. "I shot you, Lisbon."

"Hey, I'm the one who tackled a crazy man with a gun." She coughed and a trickle of red painted a wavering line down her jaw. "An unforgivable breach of protocol."

"You're going to be all right," he said. "You're teasing me. It can't be that bad if you're still able to tease me. You're going to be all right." But despite his brave words, his voice was desperate, as though even he didn't believe what he said.

She nodded wearily, not wanting to upset him further by contradicting him.

She stared up at the cloudless sky. She didn't look at the sky often enough, she reflected. She really ought to. It was so big and blue and beautiful.

"Lisbon!" Jane said frantically. "Stay with me, Lisbon."

Called back from her reflections by the uncharacteristic urgency in his tone, she returned her eyes to his. She was surprised to see his face was wet with tears. That was strange. She'd never seen Jane cry before. Never seen him allow himself to appear so vulnerable and exposed in front of anyone else before.

Her limbs felt thick and heavy, but with great effort, she managed to raise her hand enough to touch his dear, dear face, thinking to reassure him. He was almost criminally beautiful, she thought. It was unfair that any man should be that beautiful, let alone one as treacherous as Jane.

He took her hand and kissed her palm, then clutched it to his heart, his breath hiccupping oddly against his ribcage. "Don't leave me, Lisbon."

He released her hand and leaned forward, his fingers tangling in her hair as he cradled her head in one hand and traced the line of her jaw with the other. "I'll be better, Lisbon," he pleaded. "If you stay, I promise I'll be better. I'll be the man you think I am, I swear."

She wanted to tell him he was already the man she thought he was, and on this point, she'd always been able to see more clearly than he did, but she couldn't seem to speak. Her eyes were getting heavy, too. Her eyelids fluttered. She just wanted to rest them for a moment.

"Don't you dare go to sleep on me, Lisbon," he said fiercely. "You have to stay awake."

Despite his pleas, her eyes closed against her own volition, and try as she might, she could not lift her eyelids again.

"No!" Jane screamed. He threw himself on her and sobbed, horrible, gut-wrenching sounds Lisbon could hardly bear to listen to. She lay motionless beneath him, unable to comfort him with word or gesture.

He muttered and raved, lapsing into a period of incoherence made even more impenetrable by her own gradually increasing inability to focus. Then she heard him say, "It's the only way. She wouldn't like it, but it's the only way to end this."

She wouldn't like what?

She still couldn't open her eyes, but she could see out of a tiny slit in her lowered lids. She saw Jane pick up her gun and hold it to his own head.

Panic rose in her chest. What was he doing? This wasn't part of the plan.

They'd carefully loaded her gun with a single blank cartridge, unable to risk loading it entirely with blanks in case she needed it to protect herself or her team in the field before Red John and reached out and it was time to put their plan into action.

"Remember, only shoot once," she'd reminded him. "Only once. Otherwise, I could, you know, actually die."

He'd rolled his eyes. "Lisbon, even if you hadn't reminded me twenty-five times already, do you honestly think that I would forget the critical detail of the plan upon which your life depends?" He tapped his temple. "Trust me. I have an entire wing of the memory palace devoted to the task of not accidentally shooting you." Then he'd gone on to remind her at least fifty times, in his turn, that if anyone threatened her life, she must shoot them at least twice without hesitation. Preferably three times, just to be on the safe side.

If he pulled the trigger now, one of them would definitely be dead, and it wouldn't be her.

She struggled to move, to stop him, but she was helpless against the paralysis that had overcome her.

He took her hand again and pressed it to his lips again, still holding the gun to his temple with his other hand. "I don't believe in Heaven, Lisbon, and even if I did, it seems highly unlikely that I would join you there, but just in case… here's hoping I see you on the other side."

He squeezed his eyes shut and moved to pull the trigger.

Before he could make the fateful move, two iron bands encircled his chest and tore him away from her.

"Let me go!" Jane screamed, struggling violently against that which bound him.

"No way, man," Cho's calm, gruff voice replied. His arms strained against Jane's struggling form, but he held firm. "Boss'd kill me if I let you off yourself."

"Lisbon's dead," Jane said sharply.

"I know. I knew as soon as I saw you."

"As soon as you saw me?"

"Yeah. Only way an egomaniac like you would voluntarily deprive the world of your presence would be if something happened to Lisbon."

Jane slumped weakly against Cho, giving up the fight. "She's gone."

"I know."

And then Jane buried his face in Cho's shoulder and wept like a baby.

Cho held him like a mother comforting a child, his own eyes suspiciously bright as the sound of approaching sirens grew louder.

Thank God for Cho, Lisbon thought with relief. He would take care of Jane. He would make sure he wouldn't do anything foolish.

With this thought, she succumbed to the darkness seeking to overtake her.


	6. Chapter 6

When Lisbon woke up, she was lying on a cold slab in the morgue under a sheet, without any clothes on.

Ugh. The indignities of death were a bit harder to take when you were actually still alive.

"Hello, sleepyhead," a cheerful voice greeted her.

Lisbon sat up and looked into the eyes of Medical Examiner Melanie Powers. "Hey, Mel," she said. "How long was I out?"

"A very respectable 26 hours," Mel informed her. She shook her head. "That was some powerful stuff Jane dosed you with. What was in that particular cocktail, anyway?"

Lisbon shrugged and accepted the medical scrubs the ME offered her. "Something to knock me out, combined with a paralytic agent." Jane had been violently opposed to that part of the plan from the beginning. He thought it left her too vulnerable if something went wrong and Red John or his people figured out their plan and decided to derail it by kidnapping her, but Lisbon had insisted. She knew she wouldn't have been able to stay still enough on her own to make a very convincing corpse for the length of time she felt would be necessary to keep up the illusion that she was really dead.

That, after all, was the most critical element of the plan. Red John had to believe she was really dead. Jane had been all for a quick shooting inside her office, and then spiriting her away under the guise of one of his brilliant escape plans, but Lisbon had fought him on it, and she had won. He may have been the one with all the flashy ideas and clever tricks, but murder was her business, and she knew it very, very well. If they wanted Red John to believe she was really dead, short of delivering her dead body to him, they were going to need to be absolutely convincing. Lisbon's death had to be completely by the book. She would be killed, and there would be a swarm of people who would all swear they had seen her dead body lying outside for hours as the police photographed the scene, interviewed witnesses, and processed evidence.

Jane had hated this idea, not surprisingly. He always did dislike the more mundane elements of the investigation of a murder, but Lisbon knew to be true what Jane had never understood: that much of the aftermath of death was the mindless, tedious details. This was something that she secretly believed Jane and Red John had in common, although she'd never tell Jane that. They both believed in the grandeur of death, the mystique of it. She believed Red John would think that no one would voluntarily subject themselves to the grim and dreary tedium involved in being the center of a real crime scene. She was banking on it, in fact.

Mel whistled. "How did Jane get his hands on that?"

Lisbon finished pulling on the scrubs, thanking God that her favorite medical examiner was a woman and that she, Lisbon, wasn't particularly modest. "By this point, I've learned not to ask too many questions about things like that."

"A man of many talents," Mel commented.

"How is he?" Lisbon asked anxiously.

"Alive and well, cooling his heels in jail."

Lisbon nodded. "Probably befriending the more squirrely guards and fleecing his fellow prisoners as we speak."

Mel gave her an odd look. "I doubt that."

"No, seriously, I've seen Jane in jail before. That's what he does."

"Not this time. He's in solitary confinement."

Lisbon sighed. "Oh, boy. What'd he do to land himself in solitary already?"

"He's on suicide watch, T," Mel said softly.

The color drained from her face. "What?" she whispered.

"I thought you knew," Mel said slowly.

"How would I know?" Lisbon snapped. "I've been unconscious for 26 hours!"

"I know that, honey, but wasn't all of this your idea?"

Lisbon laughed shortly, but the sound was devoid of humor. "Not this part."

"I'm sure he's ok, T."

Lisbon took a deep breath. It was okay. She was being irrational. Jane was just being overdramatic, as usual. He knew she was fine. There was nothing to worry about. Jane was just playing a part. She reminded herself that if he really had been in love with her, as they'd been pretending, he would have been likely to lapse into self-destructive behavior with this recent event, given his general inability to deal with loss. It was all part of the act. Realizing Melanie was watching her with a concerned look on her face, Lisbon cleared her throat. "You're right. I'm sure he's fine." She forced a smile. "I just wasn't expecting to hear it like that. It took me by surprise."

"It was part of the plan, honey. He had to act like he would have if you had really died."

"Like he would have if he really was in love with me, you mean," Lisbon corrected.

"I mean what I say. There's not a doubt in the mind of anyone who's ever seen you together that he would go off the deep end if something happened to you. You tether him to reality, T. Do you really not know how he feels about you?"

"He doesn't feel anything about me," Lisbon objected. "We're friends."

"He lights up whenever you're around," Mel said.

Lisbon's face felt hot. "What else did I miss?" she said stiffly.

Tacitly accepting Lisbon's not so subtle message that the subject was closed, Mel moved on. "Well, you just missed Wainwright."

"What, here?" Lisbon said, startled.

"Yeah, he came to officially ID your body. I'm pretty sure he threw up afterwards. He looked pretty upset."

"Poor guy," Lisbon sighed. She felt a stab of guilt for putting Wainwright through that experience. She and Jane had decided not to let him in on the plan unless absolutely necessary. If something went wrong and they needed his help to garner CBI resources, they would let him know, but otherwise, Wainwright was to remain in the dark until they caught Red John. He'd reluctantly agreed to reinstate Jane after Lisbon had put to work her considerable powers of persuasion to convince him and Jane had submitted to the necessary expedient of actually apologizing for his behavior, but he was still rather touchy about Jane's continued association with the CBI these days. Given the circumstances (and the fact that Jane wasn't willing to rule him out as a potential mole for Red John), they thought it best not to test the limits of his tolerance by involving him in a scheme which, though Lisbon's idea, had a distinctly Jane-like air of deranged recklessness.

The list of people who knew the truth about Lisbon's supposed demise was as follows: Cho, Rigsby, Van Pelt, Mel, a forensic tech Lisbon had known for years, and an EMT friend of Cho's. Jane had practically had heart palpitations at the suggestion of including anyone outside the team, but Lisbon told him it was her plan, so they were doing things her way, and that meant trusting people for once and allowing them to help them. This was the absolute minimum number of people required to create a convincing illusion that she was really dead.

"Actually, there's been a bit of an uproar," Mel told her.

"Yeah, I could see how Red John's reappearance could do that."

Mel looked at her sideways. "It's not Red John's appearance, you dolt. It's your death. Half the CBI is calling for Jane's head on a platter for killing you. The other half- the half that knows you – is chomping at the bit to go after Red John because they are convinced he killed you and framed Jane. Everyone at the CBI is beside themselves. Your team is especially upset."

"At least they know the truth," Lisbon said.

"They're scared for you, Teresa. They saw that doll. They know that if one thing goes wrong with this insane plan of yours, Red John is planning to kill you. So yeah, I don't think they are having to pretend too hard to be upset."

Lisbon swallowed. "Oh."

"There's something else you should know."

"What's that?"

"The FBI has taken over the Red John case."

She shouldn't have been surprised, but the words came as a blow nonetheless. On the one hand, it grated on her that this case which had cost herself so much both professionally and personally, which she had devoted years to, had been casually traded to another agency like a sack of marbles on the playground. On the other hand, it wasn't like she could continue to lead the investigation when she was pretending to be dead. Jane may have wormed his way into law enforcement by pretending to be psychic, but most cops were traditionalists about dead agents attempting to lead important investigations from beyond the grave. Still, having another agency involved would make their current plan even more complicated than it already was. If the case had stayed with the CBI, with Cho leading in her place, at least they would have been able to share information, stay apprised of the investigation proceedings, and had someone to call for back up if their plan actually worked and they were able to find Red John.

Mel watched her face and put her hand on her shoulder. "It gets worse," she said sympathetically.

Lisbon looked at her with a pleading expression. "Don't tell me."

"Agent Darcy thinks Jane killed you on purpose. She thinks he's working for Red John and that's why he shot you. She's gunning for him pretty hard."

"Oh, God," Lisbon groaned.

"Wainwright's trying to talk her down. Even Bertram doesn't think Jane killed you on purpose."

"Bertram is going to bat for Jane?" Lisbon said, surprised. "Why would he do that? Bertram hates Jane."

"That's true." She looked at Lisbon pointedly. "But he has this crazy idea that Jane cares about you and would never do anything to hurt you."

Why Mel was choosing to push this particular topic now, of all times, was beyond her. She ignored this comment. "Do you have the car for me?"

"Yeah, it's in the parking garage. You'd better not so much as scratch the paint, by the way, or I'll have hell to pay. I need to get it back to my friend without him suspecting I lent it to someone else."

"Thanks. I owe you one."

"More like twelve, I'd say," Mel said. "I have clothes for you, too, once you get out of here. Van Pelt packed a bag for you. They're in the trunk of the car. Not your own stuff, since you're all being so paranoid about not doing anything that would make someone suspicious that you weren't really dead, but the stuff should fit, at least."

"Great. I guess I should go before someone else comes to see my corpse and I'm inconveniently discovered alive."

"I'll declare visiting hours over. Do you have the address of the apartment Cho found you?"

"Yes. I'm going to head straight there." Lisbon hadn't wanted to ask too many questions about how Cho had managed that, either. It was paid for in cash and it didn't have any connections to her old life, that was all that mattered.

"Good."

Mel looked upset, and Lisbon touched her arm. "You okay?"

"Sure," Mel said unconvincingly. "Just… be safe, all right?"

"I will."

Mel caught her arm. "Seriously, T. I saw the doll, too. Be careful."

"I'll be careful," Lisbon promised. "I'll leave the car at the bus station for you to pick up, okay?"

"Yeah."

Lisbon tucked her hair up under a surgeon's cap and picked up the surgeon's mask to complete her disguise as she made her way out of the building. She crossed to the door. "Thanks again, Mel. I'll be in touch when I can."

"I know. Hey, T?"

Lisbon paused in the doorway. "Yeah?"

Mel gave her a weak smile. "I hope to God you catch the bastard this time."

"That's the plan," Lisbon said grimly. Then she tied the mask over her face and left.


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Happy Valentine's Day! I am posting two chapters today as a special Valentine treat. Thank you so, so much to everyone who is following this story and to everyone who has reviewed, especially those of you who are guest reviewers who I couldn't thank individually. Seriously, you all are amazing. Someone asked how long this story will be- it is fifteen chapters long, about 35,000 words. I'd say we're just about at the halfway point now.

xxx

Lisbon dumped her bag on the couch when she got into the apartment. The place was small and shabby, but it was quiet and far from her own place, so she figured it would suit her needs. She drew the blinds and then eagerly unzipped the bag Grace had packed for her. There was a note on top. It read:

"L—Here are a few things for you. Not your usual style, but J said you have to look as unlike yourself as possible if you have to go out. He insisted on helping. I'm sure he's going to sneak a couple things in here when I'm not looking, but I suppose that's to be expected. I hate this, but maybe it will be worth it if we can finally end this whole thing. Stay safe. I'm worried about you. This should go without saying, but… we have your back. Always. – G."

To her horror, Lisbon found herself somewhat choked up by this hastily scrawled note, and she turned her attention to the contents of the bag to distract herself. She rifled through it, wrinkling her nose at several short, flouncy skirts which in her opinion would be much better suited to someone fifteen years younger than herself. She found exactly one pair of jeans… which had something pink and sparkly sewn along the edges of the back pockets. These were apparently meant to be worn with one of the many skimpy tank and halter tops included in the duffel. Ugh. Jane had definitely had a hand in picking these clothes out. The choice of wardrobe had his fingerprints all over it. She had no doubt that he would find the thought of her dressing up in these ridiculous clothes highly amusing.

The bag also contained a baseball cap, a pair of large sunglasses, a blonde wig and brown contact lenses, in case she needed to go out. She tried them on and checked out her reflection in the hall mirror. She made a face when she saw herself. The brown eyes weren't so bad, but it was disconcerting looking into her own reflection and seeing a stranger's eyes staring back. Worse, she looked absolutely terrible as a blonde. The color made her look pale and washed out instead of merely… sun-challenged. The sight of herself was an outward reminder of the need to stay hidden, and she found the whole experience more depressing than a silly wig should have been able to make her feel.

It wasn't really the wig, of course. It was just that all the subterfuge was making her feel acutely aware of her isolation from the rest of the team. Okay, so she wasn't exactly a social butterfly at the best of times, but she was used to being at the center of the action where her team was concerned, and she hadn't even spoken to any of them directly since this whole thing had started. Despite all their precautions, she felt vulnerable, exposed. She was used to operating with backup at her flanks at all times, and now she couldn't even call the office to get a status update. So, yeah, it wasn't the wig, but it sure as hell wasn't helping.

She returned to the duffel bag. More trashy clothes… she was going to kill Jane. Then she came across a Spice Girls CD tucked in a side pocket. Jane, again. She smiled despite herself. He could be sweet when he wanted to be. Maybe she wouldn't kill him after all.

She found a gift wrapped box at the bottom of the bag with a shiny red bow on the top which had been slightly crushed by the rest of the contents of the bag. She opened it hesitantly, since she was sure it was from Jane, and she was suspicious of something disgusting popping out at her like a jack in the box. His peculiar sense of humor had taught her to be wary of things in attractive packages.

Once she opened it, however, she fell upon the contents like a desert wanderer coming upon an oasis.

He'd given her a gun. A Sig Sauer p230, to be precise. She picked it up and felt the balance of it in her hand. That wasn't all, though. Beneath the gun, there was a burner phone taped to the bottom of the box, along with a charger. She turned it on and found it pre-programmed with four unfamiliar phone numbers, which apparently belonged to 'Iceman,' 'Big Foot,' 'Ginger,' and 'The Great Zambini.' She felt tears unexpectedly pricking her eyes. God, she was pathetic. Crying over a gun and a phone. It was just… he knew her so well. He knew exactly how she would feel when she got to this place, even when she had no idea herself how she would be affected, and he had sent her the two things that would make her feel safe and connected once again. Plus the Spice Girls CD. He really could be so damn sweet sometimes.

A soft knock on the door startled her out of her reverie. She picked up the gun and went to the door, checking the peephole with her heart hammering in her chest.

She breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door when she saw who it was.

Cho stood before her, his head lowered under a black baseball cap and his hands shoved in his pockets.

He came in without a word, and she closed the door behind him. She was so glad to see him that she threw her arms around him without even thinking about it.

She froze, remembering belatedly that neither of them were exactly known for being huggers, and that Cho was approximately the last person on the planet who would be comfortable being on the receiving end of a hug from his boss under the best of circumstances.

To her surprise, though, he didn't pull back immediately; instead, he hugged her back.

She let him go, clearing her throat. "Sorry," she said uncomfortably. "I'm just… really glad to see you."

Cho's expression didn't flicker. "Me, too. I'm glad you're all right."

"Is Jane okay?" she asked, hoping he'd have some news that Melanie might not have been privy to.

"All I can say is, you'd better outlive him. If he can act like this when you're only pretending to be dead, I can't imagine what he'd be like if you actually died."

She tried to brush this comment off. "Well, he's quite the actor."

He shook his head. "You didn't see him, after. Nobody's that good, unless there's something real at the heart of it."

Why was everyone choosing this opportunity to imply to her that Jane had some kind of profound emotional attachment to her? Like it was relevant to anything. They just didn't know he was capable of pretending anything when it came to Red John.

She didn't know what to say to this, so she moved on. "Everyone else all right?"

He shrugged. "As well as can be expected." He hesitated. "It's been hard," he said at last.

To hear stoic Cho, of all people, who was the type of person who didn't complain when he got hit by a car, acknowledge the strain that this whole thing was putting on all of them was unsettling.

She changed the subject. "Any leads?"

"Not much. The parachute and that doll were clean. No fingerprints, no DNA. The doll was painted with red nail polish. Kind of a play on what he does with the actual victims, we think, you know, painting their toes with their own blood. We tried to lock down the park, but all we came up with was about twenty people who saw Jane shoot you. By the time everything was cordoned off, Red John was long gone. We did find a toy helicopter in one of the garbage cans at the west end of the park that Jane thinks was used to drop the parachute on you guys."

"Guess Jane was right about that, at least," Lisbon said, trying to feel encouraged that Jane's insight into the killer was spot on occasionally, when it wasn't completely, disastrously wrong. She hoped her own plan didn't fall into the latter category, for all their sakes. "Mel told me the FBI took over the Red John case. Has Darcy been keeping you in the loop?"

"Not exactly. She's been keeping Wainwright informed, and he's been passing the information to us. I get the sense that she doesn't trust the rest of us as far as she can throw us."

"Fair enough," Lisbon said with a sigh. It was inconvenient, but she could hardly blame Darcy. She probably would have done the same thing, in her shoes.

"We processed everything from the scene ourselves, but we have to turn over everything to the FBI at the end of the week."

The evidence being turned over to the FBI meant that new people, new eyes would be looking at it, looking for inconsistencies, suggestions that the evidence might have been tampered with. Like, for example, bloodstains that were from a dead chicken and a dead body that was supposed to be lying in the morgue that was presently up and walking around Sacramento. "That's… not good."

"Yeah. We've got it covered, though. Van Pelt is switching out some of the evidence from when you were shot by O'Laughlin. We should be good."

"God. I'm so sorry you guys are having to do this."

"It'll be worth it, if it keeps you safe."

Seriously, she hadn't nearly cried this many times in one day for over twenty years. "Cho, I…"

"I know."

"Really."

"I know."

She leaned back and looked at him. "When all this is over…"

"Yeah."

"Seriously. I owe you all big time."

"You can buy us a steak dinner."

"Forget dinner, I'm going to have to buy you all new cars. Nice ones."

"Steak dinner for Rigsby's gonna set you back about that much, anyway."

"You guys are the best, you know that? It really means a lot to me, what you've done for me and Jane."

"Don't mention it." He checked his watch. "Listen, I have to go. We can't risk me being seen in this neighborhood while you're here."

"I know. Thanks for coming."

"I shouldn't have come at all. I just wanted to make sure you were all right."

"I'm glad you did," she said, her voice full with emotion.

He scrubbed his hand over his face. "Just… figure it out, quick, okay, boss? It sucks there without you."

She nodded, knowing what a vain promise she was making, and knowing he knew it, too.


	8. Chapter 8

It was remarkable how quickly she grew to hate the scuff marked walls of her temporary safe house. She couldn't go out, because there was a very real danger she might be recognized. She knew this because she'd been watching the news obsessively, and even days after her alleged death, her face was plastered all over every major news broadcast at the top of the hour, every hour.

She chafed at the inactivity. She'd started going for runs very early in the morning, before first light, wearing the wig and cap, just to escape the apartment. The long runs were possibly quite literally the only thing keeping her sane, but even they were losing their luster. Going out so early wouldn't be so bad, if she could have lingered by the water through sunrise, but as it was, she was so paranoid about being recognized that she made every effort to return to the apartment while it was still dark and the shadows still obscured her face beneath the dark cap.

The lack of daylight was getting to her. She felt like a ghost in her own skin. The constant need to hide herself and the lack of human contact was starting to make her almost believe in the reports of her own death. Cho called once a day on the burner phones Jane had given them to give her a status update (no new leads, surprise, surprise), but their conversations were brief and she hadn't seen him or anyone else from the team since his first visit after this whole nightmare had begun.

With nothing but her own thoughts for company, she was forced to acknowledge to herself how much she missed Jane. She missed the team, too, of course, but there was no denying that Jane was foremost in her thoughts. She was worried about him, and it made her crazy not being able to just stalk over to his couch or up to the attic to check on him, but even more than that, she just missed his company.

She would have liked to attribute this feeling to the increased amount of time they'd been spending together recently to perpetuate their grand deception, but the truth was that even before their plot against Red John, he'd been the person with whom she spent most of her waking hours, the person whose company she preferred over anyone else's, despite his ability to aggravate her more than anyone else on the planet.

She'd had very little word of him, except that he was still on suicide watch. This continued to distress her despite the many rationalizations by both herself and others that this was part of his act.

She didn't understand why he hadn't tried to escape yet. Originally, she had been convinced that if Jane escaped from prison, with all ties to the CBI cut off and nowhere to go, Red John would reach out to him. The killer had always been drawn to him. She privately thought that Jane was the only person he felt connected to. He was the only person who challenged him, the only one who could engage him as his intellectual peer. She'd been sure that he would jump at the chance to get closer to Jane, when Jane was alone and vulnerable.

Now she was full of doubt. Had her whole plan been borne of the weakness that she so faulted in both Red John and Jane, that of arrogance? Her certainty that she might be able to predict what Red John might do now seemed incredibly presumptuous. She'd been dangerously overconfident in her commitment to the execution of her plan, which now seemed not only to not be working, but downright absurd. After all, where had it gotten her? Cloistered in a dingy apartment, alone, doing nothing but obsess about Jane and Red John, instead of doing her job with the secure knowledge that Jane couldn't get into any more trouble than pissing off someone important while he was under her protection. In fact, it was starting to seem like letting Jane out of her sight for a prolonged period of time was possibly the worst idea she'd ever had.

What remained disturbing to her was the fact that he was still in solitary confinement. She couldn't understand why he hadn't contrived to get out of it. Even Jane might find it difficult to get out of jail when under twenty-four hour surveillance. It would be infinitely easier for him to escape if he could just pretend to be sane for a little while and get himself placed in a less secure area of the facility. She tried to have faith, telling herself that Jane had executed far more complicated schemes than this without even leaving his couch, and that she was overreacting. But a part of her worried that something had happened to him, something that had caused him to finally crack, and she wasn't even there to help him pick up the pieces.

When there was a sharp knock at the door on the fifth day of enduring an endless loop of these thoughts, she was so grateful for the interruption, she would have been glad to see Red John himself, just to give herself something different to worry about.

It was not Red John, however. It was Rigsby, standing outside with his shoulders hunched and his head down. She opened the door eagerly, but her initial pleasure at seeing him was immediately eclipsed by dread once she got a good look at his face.

"What's wrong?" she demanded even before he made it all the way through the door.

He closed the door behind him and looked at her. He hesitated. "I think I'd better start from the beginning."

She gestured impatiently for him to get on with it, whatever it was.

"At about 7:30 pm, Cho got a call from the prison. They told him that Jane was found in his room at approximately 6:45 pm, unconscious and bleeding from the wrists."

"Bleeding?" Lisbon said, her voice cracking with tension. It sounded high and vulnerable to her own ears.

Rigsby nodded. "After investigating the incident, prison security determined that Jane had managed to steal a ball point pen from one of the guards. He stripped the pen down and was able to use the metal casing to inflict several cuts to each of his wrists."

This didn't make any sense. "Is… is it bad?"

"The doctor who examined him said he didn't do any lasting harm to himself. He said if it weren't for the placement of the cuts, he would have thought he'd done it more to cause himself pain than to kill himself. Said cutting is often a way for people in severe psychological distress to control their inner pain. Physical pain is easier to deal with, so they cause the pain to manifest externally to give themselves some measure of control over the pain they're experiencing on the inside."

Lisbon pushed the implications of what he was saying aside and focused on the part she could deal with. "But he's okay now, right?" she said anxiously. "He'll heal?"

Rigsby hesitated. "The doctor said the cuts should heal fine, as long as they don't get infected."

"Thank God," she sighed. "Listen, I need you to call a woman named Sophie Miller and ask her to go to the prison to talk to him. Jane knows her- she can help him. Maybe she can talk some sense into him."

Rigsby shook his head. "There's more."

Cold dread gripped her insides. "What?"

"Jane's missing," he said soberly.

Lisbon nearly collapsed with relief. "Oh, thank God." She took a deep breath. That's what this whole cutting thing was about. She was worried over nothing. It was all one of his tricks. He'd probably used ketchup stolen from the cafeteria as blood to fool the doctor and the guards. "It's about damn time he made his escape. I was starting to worry he'd lost his touch."

Rigsby shook his head. The look he gave her was an unhappy mix of sorrow and pity. "He didn't escape."

That cold dread settled in her stomach like a stone. "What do you mean?"

He sighed. "When the prison called us, Cho said he was going down there to see Jane. Van Pelt went with him. I stayed behind to cover the phones. But when they got down there, the entire staff at the prison was all keyed up due to a security breach and nobody could tell them anything about Jane. Cho finally forced the staff to take them to one of the administrators, and she told him there was a security breach at 7:47 pm tonight. An alarm went off at the southeast corner of the facility, but when the guards checked the area, they couldn't find any evidence of anything wrong, so they assumed it was a false alarm. But they did a bed check to make sure, and they found that Jane wasn't in his room. The guard outside his room was found just outside the door, unconscious, with a bullet in his shoulder which missed a major artery by about an inch. When he came to, he said two guys came down the hall wearing guard uniforms. One of them shot him using a silencer, and then they both went in and took Jane."

All the color drained from her face. "No," she whispered, knowing what this meant.

Rigsby avoided her gaze. "He said before he passed out, he saw them rip off Jane's bandages and paint a smiley face on the wall in his own blood." He finally raised his eyes to hers. "It was Red John. He has Jane."


	9. Chapter 9

Everything went black for a moment. When awareness claimed her again, Rigsby was gripping her arm and asking her if she was all right. She shook him off and ignored his concern. She went to the desk in the living room and pulled out the gun Jane had given her. "We have to go," she said woodenly, tucking the gun away at the small of her back. She pocketed the cell phone he'd given her for good measure.

Rigsby looked alarmed. "What? No. You need to stay hidden. I just came to tell you what happened. Cho is on it. He said under no circumstances were you to expose yourself right now, especially with Red John resurfacing at this time. He and Van Pelt are investigating the scene. They'll find him, boss."

Lisbon shook her head. Did they honestly think she was just going to sit around in this horrible apartment and wait around to find out whether Jane was dead at the hands of Red John? "We need to go to the prison and see if we can find anything out about where they've taken him. We'll need to get Van Pelt on the security footage. Maybe she can get a face or a license number, or at least the direction they're traveling. You and Cho can interview the prisoners and guards and find out if anybody saw anything. I'll talk to the head of security and find out how the alarm was set off and how they got back out without setting it off again."

"You can't go to the prison, Lisbon," Rigsby said firmly. "Everyone thinks you're dead."

"Well, I'm not dead, and I'm going to the prison to get to the bottom of this."

Rigsby drew himself up to his full height. "I can't let you do that," he said, folding his arms over his chest in a gesture Lisbon recognized as a move he used when trying to make himself appear intimidating to suspects.

Lisbon gave him an incredulous look. "Oh, yeah? Well, unless you're planning to shoot me or wrestle me to the ground and cuff me to the radiator, you're not going to be able to stop me. Now, are you coming, or not?"

Rigsby deflated at her look and uncrossed his arms, defeated. "Yeah."

"Great. I'll drive."

xxx

There was a minor problem when they got to the prison and Lisbon realized that not only did she not have her badge anymore, she didn't even have any id.

Then Cho showed up and produced Lisbon's badge from his inside breast pocket, handing it to prison security without a word. He gave Rigsby a look.

Rigsby shifted uncomfortably and muttered, "What? I'd like to have seen you try to stop her."

Lisbon ignored them. "I want to see the person in charge of this facility," she informed the guards, her demeanor brooking no argument.

They took a look at her face and scurried off to find the person who had let Red John's men take Jane from the prison under her supervision.

A small blonde woman in her mid-forties returned with them five minutes later. She smiled tensely at Lisbon when she saw her. "Hello. How can I help you?"

Lisbon flashed her newly reacquired badge, feeling more like herself than she had in days. "I understand there was a security breach at this facility a couple of hours ago. I need to you to tell me everything you know about what happened."

"With all due respect, this is really an internal matter. We are doing everything possible to investigate the issue and—"

Lisbon cut her off. "This stopped being an internal matter the minute you allowed two individuals posing as security guards kidnap one of the prisoners under your care out from under your nose."

The woman straightened, her spine stiff. "Excuse me, but—"

Lisbon was in no mood to play nicely with others, not when Jane's life was on the line. "No, I don't think I will. And I don't think the governor will, either, when he finds out you failed to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into one of the most dangerous serial killers in the history of California. Now, tell me about the security breach."

The administrator looked at her more closely and did a double take. "Aren't you-?"

"Yes," Lisbon said, her tone making it clear that she wasn't about to waste precious time explaining her miraculous return from the dead.

The other woman wisely chose not to ask further questions. "As near as we can figure, someone hacked into our alarm system and triggered an alarm at the southeastern corner of the facility. When the security team investigated it, they found no trace of any activity that might have triggered the alarm. However, once we realized Mr. Jane was missing, we realized they must have set it off as a diversion."

Lisbon frowned. "I don't understand. If they could control the alarm system, why didn't they just rig it so no alarm would be set off at all?"

"Because they knew if an alarm was set off, extra personnel would be sent to that part of the facility, and they needed the hallways clear to effect Mr. Jane's abduction. Two men posing as guards took him out of his room. A few of the prisoners saw them carry Mr. Jane down the hall on a stretcher."

"Does anyone know for certain if he was alive when they took him?" Lisbon said, forcing her voice into a semblance of calm she didn't remotely feel.

"Oh, yes, he was definitely alive. His eyes were closed, but he was moaning and thrashing about. The prisoners assumed he was ill and the guards were taking him to the infirmary."

Well, that was something, at least. "Can any of the prisoners id the men who took him?"

"We're working with sketch artists now, but it will take some time to get the finished sketches and run them through the database."

Time they didn't have. "Who was the last person to see Jane before he was taken?" Lisbon asked abruptly.

The woman blinked. "Dr. Fellows, I believe. He spoke to Mr. Jane a few minutes before the alarm went off."

Dr. Fellows skyrocketed to the top of her lists of suspects. "I need to speak to him."

The interview with Dr. Fellows was brief and unproductive. He reported that Jane was suffering from a deep depression and had been minimally responsive when being treated. It was his decided opinion that Jane was a danger to himself, but he had no useful information about the kidnapping whatsoever. Lisbon decided she didn't like Dr. Fellows.

Lisbon, Cho, and Rigsby interviewed prisoners, tried to find out if any of them knew anything about where the men might have taken Jane, but it was no use. Everything was a dead end. Lisbon's last shred of hope died when Van Pelt appeared and reported that the security footage had not only failed to capture a single useful image of Jane's abductors, but it had not yielded the smallest clue about which direction they might have started in after leaving the prison.

Lisbon listened to Van Pelt's report with a darkening expression. Nothing. That's what they had to go on. After all this time, and everything she'd put them all through with her stupid plan, Jane was gone and they were still no closer to getting Red John.

All in all, she preferred it when it was Jane's crazy ideas that went completely wrong. At least then she could yell at him in righteous anger when one of his schemes went south and focus her energy on fixing whatever had gone wrong. Now she had only herself to blame, cold fear and frustration churning in her stomach, and no idea what to do next.

"No," she said aloud, more harshly than she intended. "This is unacceptable."

Van Pelt flinched, and Lisbon remembered that Jane had told her on more than one occasion that the majority of the employees at the CBI were at least a little bit afraid of her, including her own team, who would kill and die for her. Why that was, she wasn't entirely sure, when she was about half the size of nearly every one she worked with, but there was no denying that when she was upset, people had a tendency to steer clear of her in the hallways. Belatedly, it occurred to her that Van Pelt must have thought her comment was a critique of her work, and she felt a stab of guilt for her harsh words. Then she shook her head, refocusing. She didn't have time to coddle Van Pelt right now. She'd apologize later, when Jane was safe again.

"We need to go back to the scene," Lisbon said firmly.

Cho glanced at her. "Rigsby and I went over it about eight times. There's nothing there."

Lisbon shook her head. "No. This is Jane we're talking about. He would have left us a clue."

"They knocked him out and kidnapped him," Rigsby pointed out. "I don't think he was up for much clue leaving."

"He would have had a plan," Lisbon said stubbornly. "We just can't see it. But once we figure it out, we'll be able to find him and bring him back."

The others exchanged doubtful glances, but didn't argue, and followed her when she marched down the corridor to the cell where Jane had been held.

It wasn't a pretty sight. Beyond the obviously distressing sight of the familiar smiley face she knew to be painted in Jane's own blood, the cell was barren and dim. She surveyed the grimy padded walls, the plastic mattress on the floor, and the single fluorescent lamp casting a sickly glow over the small room. Jesus. If Jane hadn't been suicidal before being thrown in this hole, he might well have become so after a few hours here.

Worst of all, there was nothing to search. There was so little in the room, there was nowhere to hide anything in it.

No. This was Jane. He could hide an elephant behind a palm tree, if he put his mind to it. She just had to think like him and figure out where the palm tree was. If she could figure that out, she would be able to find the elephant.

Okay, so she was Jane, and she needed a place to hide something. What would be her first move? Her eyes drifted to the plastic mattress on the floor. She walked over to it and lay down on top of it, wrinkling her nose as the plastic crinkled under her weight. Ew. She hoped the damn thing was at least somewhat sanitary.

"Uh, boss?" Rigsby said uncertainly.

She ignored him and closed her eyes. This part, she knew. He liked to stretch out when he was thinking, and when his eyes were closed, that was when his mind was often the most active. So here she was. She had something to hide in this tiny, barren room. It would have to be small. And not easily spotted by anyone but her or the team. He wouldn't have trusted his clue with anyone else.

She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling, thinking of Jane and his Elvis spot. She got up. The team was watching her with bemused expressions. She knew what to do now. "Cho, Rigsby, I need you to take this mattress apart. We're looking for something small. I'm not sure what, and it won't be obvious. It might not seem like it's connected to Jane, but if you see anything that seems the least bit unusual, let me know so I can take a look. Grace, you and I are going to search the walls."

Grace eyed the padded walls with doubt, but didn't argue.

Lisbon took a penlight out of her pocket and scanned the wall nearest the bed. The padding in the walls was uniform and blank, with no sign of tampering. However, something could conceivably be hidden in them, if it was small enough, and Jane had access to the right materials to do so. She felt cheered by this. Jane always did say the best place to hide something was where there were a lot of other things that looked just like it, and the walls were the most uniform element of the room. The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that Jane had managed to hide something in them. A normal person might have had difficulty with this task when under such tight surveillance, but Lisbon had no doubt that Jane would have been able to acquire whatever tools he needed to get the job done—a small knife, perhaps, to rip the seams of the padded walls, and a needle and thread, to sew them back up after inserting something in them. How he would have been able to acquire these items, she had no idea, but that he would be able to, if that was his intention, there was not a doubt in her mind.

At first she tried to look for some indication that one section of the wall had been tampered with- a clumsy stitch, or a slightly different shade of thread, but there were too many places to look, and Jane was too precise to have left such a clear indication of his meddling in the exact spot where he'd meddled. Besides, he wouldn't have expected her to look over every inch of the walls. He would have left a sign, possibly interpretable only by her, to guide her search.

She'd scanned the first wall and was about halfway through the second when Grace called her name. "I think I found something," she said, her voice indicating that she wasn't sure how useful her clue might be.

Lisbon was on the other side of the room in the blink of an eye, and she felt Cho and Rigsby crowd behind her as they abandoned their examination of the mattress to peer at Van Pelt's discovery.

It was a small 'Z,' scratched into the floor a few inches from the wall Van Pelt had been searching.

"Looks like graffiti," Cho commented.

"That could have been there for years," Rigsby said, sounding dismayed. "And what's with the 'Z?' If it were from Jane, shouldn't it be a 'P' or a 'J?'"

Lisbon was quiet. If this were a normal prison cell, she would agree with Cho. But this wasn't a normal prison wall, covered from end to end with lines of graffiti from years' worth of inmates. This was a cell with padded walls and no sharp implements. Most prisoners in this cell wouldn't have had access to anything they could have used to etch this symbol into the floor. But Jane had stolen a pen and gouged his own flesh with it. Could he have used the same implement to leave her a message?

"What do you think, boss?" Cho asked her. "Does the 'Z' mean anything to you?"

Lisbon pulled out her phone and looked at the contact list. Iceman. Big Foot. Ginger. And the Great Zambini. "It's him," she said with conviction. "It's definitely from Jane." Excitement coursed through her. They had a break. Finally.

"Not much of a clue, is it?" Rigsby mused, oblivious.

She ignored him and started scanning the wall above the 'Z,' looking again for evidence that it might have been tampered with. The team seemed unconvinced, but they helped her search, nonetheless.

Fifteen minutes later, they'd scoured every inch of the wall with nothing to show for it. Lisbon nearly punched the wall in frustration, but she forced herself to calm down. Remember, this is Jane, she reminded herself. Jane is paranoid. He wouldn't want anyone else to know where his hidden treasure was.

She stopped. That was it. They were being too literal. Just as the 'Z' was meant to be a disguise for the true identity of its author, its location, too, was likely some form of misdirection. But it was also meant for her, so there must be some element of the scratched in figure that pointed to where she was supposed to look.

She tilted her head, examining it. Maybe the two ends of the 'Z' could be thought of as arrows, pointing to opposite ends of the room. She turned ninety degrees to the left and started running her fingers over the wall where the head of the 'Z' was pointing, instructing Cho to do the same to the wall opposite her.

Nothing.

She returned to the 'Z,' staring at it intensely.

Suddenly, she thought of a case they'd had long ago—the Wagner case. It had been Van Pelt's first case with them, and it was a Red John copycat. Jane had known it was a copycat because the signature smiley face was on the wrong wall. He'd said if it was really Red John, you see the smiley face first, and then you only see the body afterwards. Wagner had painted the smiley face on the wrong wall because he hadn't known that it was supposed to cue the person to find the body.

Lisbon turned around abruptly and attacked the wall directly opposite the 'Z' with renewed fervor.

She found it after only two minutes. A slight lump in the padding, not far from the floor, completely unnoticeable unless you were really looking for it. She borrowed a jackknife from Rigsby and ripped the seam of the wall so eagerly she almost slipped and cut herself. She didn't, though. She cast the knife aside and wiggled her fingers into the padding, biting back a cry of triumph when something cool and hard met her fingertips. She pulled it out carefully and gazed at it.

It was a small black object, no bigger than three inches long and maybe two inches wide, with a dark screen and a small switch on the side. Some kind of electronic device. She flipped the switch, and it lit up merrily, a familiar logo emblazoned across the screen for a few seconds before switching over to its normal operating mode: an image of a map, with a blinking red dot in the middle of it.

He'd left them a GPS device.

He was a pain in the ass, and more often than not, she wanted to strangle him, but sometimes, she could just kiss Patrick Jane.


	10. Chapter 10

It only took thirty minutes to get there.

The GPS unit guided them to a place in the foothills near the Sacramento River, an expansive but run down ranch which housed a rambling old mansion that looked like it had been built during the Gold Rush days tucked between the hills.

They pulled up in front of the house with the headlights dimmed, the only audible sound the muffled crunch of the tires on the gravel drive. Cho killed the engine and they climbed out of the car, staring at the shadowy monstrosity before them.

"SWAT's fifteen minutes out," Rigsby reported, shutting his phone.

Lisbon raked her fingers through her hair, debating whether to storm the castle gates immediately, so to speak, or to wait for the SWAT team to arrive.

"Think it's a trap?" Cho asked.

Lisbon considered this. It was a valid question. They'd followed the GPS blindly, but they didn't have any assurance that it hadn't been a plant by the men who'd taken Jane. She didn't believe this, however. The oblique reference to the 'Great Zambini' that had led her to the device was classic Jane. More of concern to her was the notion that the GPS could have been taken from him and that this wasn't actually where he was. "No. I don't think so," she said finally.

"What's the plan?" Van Pelt asked.

Lisbon bit her lip. She had to be smart. It had never been more important to make the right decision. Only, which was the right decision – waiting for SWAT or going in immediately? Either way, they had no idea what they were getting into. Jane had been taken over three hours earlier- logically, waiting the fifteen additional minutes wasn't likely to make much of a difference. It would be more prudent to wait for SWAT, but every fiber in her being was telling her to act now. Besides, SWAT were the best of the best, but there were always a lot of them and you could only be so quiet with that many rustling bodies moving through the shadows with semi- automatic weapons. And then there was her team. Despite how many times she'd insisted to Jane they were cops and it was their job to put themselves in danger, big sister instincts died hard, and she suddenly hated the idea of putting any of her team in Red John's sights for even a moment.

"Don't even think about it," Cho said, reading her thoughts on her face. "There's no way we're letting you go in there alone. We know what we signed up for." Rigsby and Van Pelt nodded their agreement.

This decided her. "Okay. Cho, you're with me. Van Pelt, go around the house and cover the back. Rigsby, I'm sorry, but I need you to stay here and wait for SWAT. Once they get here, get them organized and come in behind us, but don't come in guns blazing, okay? If we're going to have any advantage over Red John, we need to have at least some element of surprise on our side. We go in quiet, and we go in fast, got it?"

Rigsby stayed at the car, looking huge and tense, and Van Pelt slipped off into the night with a grim look on her face.

Lisbon could feel Cho at her back as she climbed the steps to the front porch, her gun drawn and her heart in her throat. When they reached the front door, she muttered a quick prayer and tried the knob.

Locked. She turned to Cho. "Can you take care of it?" she whispered.

He peered closely at it. "I think so."

Long, dreadful seconds ticked by as Cho jimmied the lock.

It popped open.

Lisbon entered first, stepping lightly in hopes of avoiding any creaky floorboards. The house was quiet and dark. There were no streetlights near the isolated house, and no moon that night to illuminate the darkened rooms, so they had to move forward as best they could in the near blinding darkness. They came upon an ornate staircase leading to the second story, and Lisbon motioned for Cho to search the upstairs. She would take the ground floor.

The living room and dining room were empty, full of darkly expensive furniture and nothing else. The only evidence of human habitation was a half-empty glass of wine set on top of a massive grand piano that dominated the first room.

Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness by this point, but nonetheless she tripped over something just inside the swinging door when she entered the kitchen. She bit off a yelp of surprise and swore under her breath instead. The floor was slippery and she had to move carefully to regain her footing. She bent down to examine what she'd tripped over, and realized it wasn't a something, after all. It was a someone.

Two someones, in fact.

She recognized the prison guard uniforms first. Two men, both young, with dark hair. They looked enough alike to be brothers, rendered more alike by the identical wide grinning lines where their throats had been slit. The floor was sticky with their blood. Neither of them could have been older than twenty-two, she reflected sadly. God. What was he like, that he could have attracted and corrupted these two young men so thoroughly, and then disposed of them so easily; so untrusting that he'd destroyed two disciples loyal to him to preclude any possibility of betrayal, yet secure in the knowledge that he could always attract others to the sticky web of his will? It didn't even look like they'd struggled.

She swallowed convulsively, praying with all her might that she wouldn't find Jane in a similar state.

There was nothing that could be done for the poor twisted souls on the kitchen floor, so she stood and moved silently across the kitchen. It held nothing else of interest except a white door near the corner of the room. It was probably just a pantry, she thought nervously. She checked it anyway.

The moment she laid her hand on the door handle, she knew that this was what she was looking for. Her blood thrummed in her ears and her heart was beating a rat-a-tat-tat against her rib cage. Despite her religious background, she didn't usually go for what Jane called the 'hoodoo voodoo' part of Christian mythology that Grace put so much stock in, the part that dealt with speaking to relatives beyond the dead and miracle healers, but as certainly as she knew her own name, she knew there was evil on the other side of this door. For good or ill, after all these years, she was finally going to face Red John, and she was going to find him behind this door.

She touched the cross on her neck and checked the clip in her gun. At the very least, she had God and a Sig Sauer on her side, which she figured shortened her odds. She shifted her grip on her gun and opened the door, ready to end this once and for all.


	11. Chapter 11

A long, narrow staircase tunneled out before her, leading to a dimly lit basement. She crept down the stairs, unconsciously holding her breath for fear of betraying herself with even so slight a sound. She hit the bottom step with a tread so light bats couldn't have heard it.

There he was.

The good news was that Jane was alive. The bad news was that he was tied to a support beam and Red John was standing over him with a knife in his hand.

The killer's back was to her. He was a tall man, with broad shoulders and slim hips. He had dark hair and pale skin, but she couldn't see his face. It seemed he was to remain an enigma even now.

She turned her attention to Jane.

The bandages for his forearms littered the floor around him; several new cuts had joined the jagged marks on his arms, as straight and vivid as shiny new ribbons. Jane's eyes looked empty, vacant. Lisbon's breath caught in her throat. God, what had this monster done to him?

She raised her weapon, prepared to end this hunt once and for all before Red John could do anything else to hurt Jane, but there were piles of crates obscuring her view of the scene; she didn't have a good angle on the killer from where she was standing. She'd have to try to get closer.

As she crept forward, Red John drove his left fist into Jane's ribcage without relinquishing his hold on the knife in his other hand.

Jane grimaced, but he didn't fight back, didn't try to twist away.

"Oh my, this is disappointing, Patrick," the man crooned. His light tenor voice raised the hair on the back of Lisbon's neck. "What fun will this be if you refuse to play?"

"Just kill me," Jane said dully. He lifted his eyes to Red John's. "Please. I just want peace, now."

"Oh, no, Patrick. You're far too valuable to me to give you up so easily."

Lisbon continued to inch forward, hardly daring to breathe lest she alert Red John to her presence before she had a clear line on him with her weapon.

Jane turned his face away in bitter resignation, but made no further reply. He looked utterly defeated, as though he knew his fate, but lacked the energy to resist it.

Red John stepped closer to him and caressed his cheek like a lover. "I can give you peace, Patrick. You know I can."

"By making me forget what I've lost?" Jane shook his head. "No, thanks. I'm not interested."

She paused behind one of the crates. Two more steps should do it.

"Why do you insist on holding onto them, when it can only bring you pain?" Red John sounded equal parts repulsed and fascinated.

"They are the best part of me. Would you willingly give up the best part of yourself, just to escape the pain?"

Red John shook his head. "A pity. I feel sorry for you, Patrick. It would be so much easier that way. I will admit this makes it more interesting for me, however. It's been so long since I've had a playmate who could keep me entertained for so long. I'm looking forward to many more hours of this. Possibly days. I will have you in the end, you know. What is that saying policemen are so fond of?" He giggled, a chilling sound. "Ah, yes—'I always get my man.' But first, a little more play time, I think. You'll start to enjoy it after awhile. I'm sure of it." He drew his knife lightly down Jane's arm, softly enough not to do any major damage, but with enough force that blood welled in its wake.

Lisbon stepped out from behind the crate, her weapon trained on his chest. "Step away from him," she ordered. She was pleased to note her voice sounded sure and strong, the way it usually did, as though she were used to giving commands and having them obeyed. Not like she was terrified that a sociopath with a knife was about to take someone important away from her.

He stilled, the muscles in his broad back tensing for the tiniest fraction of a moment before he relaxed again. He turned slowly to face her, a slight smile on his lips.

He was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen. High cheekbones, an elegantly carved jaw, and a cherry red mouth, all framed by thick black hair formed a picture that might have been painted by one of the masters. The only hint of imperfection in his face was his eyes. He had one green eye, one blue, but both were so piercingly bright that they only added to the appeal of his physical features rather than detracting from them. In addition, he exuded charisma and a peculiar kind of self-possessed grace she'd never seen before.

Lord help her, the man made even Jane look a little plain. No wonder he had no trouble attracting followers eager to do anything to please him. She knew what he truly was, and even she found his gaze arresting.

"Hello, Agent Lisbon," he said serenely. "Not as dead as originally advertised, I see."

The words tickled a memory in the back of her mind and Lisbon frowned, trying to remember why they sounded familiar to her. She brushed the thought aside impatiently. She could stroll down memory lane later. She needed to focus on the task at hand. "As you see," she said coolly.

"I must confess I'm not entirely surprised by your sudden resurrection. I did find it difficult to believe Patrick would be so careless with something so precious to him. It's not a mistake I would have expected him to make twice, at any rate."

He turned back to Jane, apparently having lost interest in her and the gun she had leveled at his head. His eyes were bright with energy.

"Well done, Patrick. Very well done. Oh, I am pleased," he said, sounding thoroughly delighted. "You really had me going. I didn't believe it at first, of course, but several of my friends told me they'd seen the body themselves. You must have had an unspeakable number of people in on it. Not your usual style, Patrick, but very effective."

"Don't look at me," Jane said tightly. "It was her idea."

Red John turned back to Lisbon, looking truly interested in her presence for the first time. "Was it now?" he said softly. "How intriguing. It seems I underestimated you, Agent Lisbon. I believe you'll be a much more entertaining playmate than I originally anticipated." He shook his head and looked back at Jane. "Still, it was you that made it work. A remarkable performance. You seemed truly broken by her death. And the suicide attempt—that was the most brilliant part. You gambled everything on that."

Jane lifted his head and stared at him with a familiar mulish look in his eye. "It worked, didn't it?"

He smiled. "We shall see, Patrick, won't we? Myself, I'm inclined to think that I have a little more playtime in my future."

"Your play days are over, you son of a bitch," Lisbon said evenly. "You're under arrest."

He laughed in her face. "Oh, I think we're past that, don't you?"

He made a gesture so quick and fluid Lisbon barely had time to react. Her brain processed the movement just in time for her to throw herself sideways to avoid the knife hissing towards her.

As it was, she wasn't quite fast enough. The knife buried itself in her left shoulder, its flight arrested by muscle and sinew.

She flinched, but managed to stay on her feet. Son of a bitch. And she'd thought being shot had hurt. She'd just gotten that arm back to full strength from the last round of physical therapy, too. She didn't have time to dwell on that, though. She returned her attention to Red John.

He moved with preternatural speed and grace. He produced another knife with a flourish Lisbon recognized. Oddly, it reminded her of Jane presenting something he'd had hidden up his sleeve as though he were a magician, the flourish meant to distract the eye from the reality of what was happening. In this case, however, the reality was clear enough. Before she could recover herself, he pressed the knife to Jane's throat and stepped behind him, using Jane's body to shield him from any harm she may have inflicted with her weapon.

God, she was an idiot. A procedure-following, consultant-endangering idiot. She should have shot the bastard when she had the chance. She assessed the situation. She had a line on his head, but Jane was blocking his body and Red John's face was pressed close to Jane's own. She was a good shot, but there was no room for error here, and with the wound in her arm, she couldn't even raise her left arm to steady her hand as she trained the gun on the killer's head. If she missed, she'd more than likely hit Jane. If she made the shot, she could lose Jane to a slip of the knife. Either outcome was unacceptable.

Which was exactly what he planned.

She kept the gun trained on his head. She was so sick of this shit. It was time to end this. "What's your endgame, here? We've got you, this time. You're not walking out of here free. Put down the knife, and at least you'll get out of here alive."

He laughed again, that horrible, spine-chilling sound. "I don't think so, Teresa. I've got grander plans for my future."

"Give it up," she said evenly. God, her arm hurt. "You're done. A SWAT team is going to be busting in here at any moment."

"I can still kill both of you before they touch me. Do you honestly think I'm going to allow myself to be herded like an animal into the back of a police car by creatures less than I am?"

"I think either myself or a member of my team is going to arrest you, and you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison like the common criminal you are," Lisbon said calmly.

"Just shoot him, Lisbon," Jane said harshly.

"I don't think so, Patrick," Red John said softly into his ear. "Agent Lisbon knows that even if she manages to put a bullet in my brain, the last firings of my synapses could cause me to jerk this knife towards myself – killing you with my dying reflex."

"Lisbon, just kill him. I told you a long time ago- It'll be worth my life if he's gone for good," Jane said, his voice desperate.

"Shut up, Jane," she said, without breaking eye contact with Red John.

Red John smiled at her. "That's your trouble, Agent Lisbon. You're so conveniently predictable. You won't risk this one life for the greater good, just because you care about him."

"Maybe she won't," said a voice behind them. Van Pelt descended a second staircase behind them, her jaw tight and her eyes glittering with rage, her gun trained on Red John. "But I will."


	12. Chapter 12

A/N: I have been accused of being evil and a terrible tease, what with all these cliffhangers I've been throwing at you, so I am bowing to peer pressure and posting a second chapter today in hopes of redeeming myself. So you see, begging and pleading (and just reviewing in general) does get results! Thank you so much to all you wonderful reviewers out there, and everyone following along with this story. Three chapters to go after this one. Enjoy!

xxx

Van Pelt fired, the crack of the shot slicing through the silence of the night.

"No!" Lisbon cried. She saw the bullet penetrate Red John's skull and started forward as she saw the man's arm clench convulsively, jerking his knife into the flesh of Jane's throat by reflex, just as he'd said.

She dropped her gun and yanked the knife out of her shoulder, letting it, too, clatter to the floor, and was across the room in a flash. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, one that Jane had lent her some time ago, and pressed it to his neck to slow the bleeding.

"Lisbon?" That was Cho's voice, coming from the same stairs she herself had descended a few moments and several centuries ago.

"Cho! I need you here," she said desperately.

"Lisbon," Jane croaked. "I'm okay."

She concentrated on keeping the pressure on his wound. "Shut up, Jane."

Cho came over. "Cut him free," she ordered.

"Got it," Cho said. He retrieved the knife from the floor and severed the knots binding Jane to the support beam.

Jane stumbled forward and she was forced to drop her hand from his neck to avoid being knocked over as he tumbled into her.

"Jane?" she said frantically. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," he gasped. He took the handkerchief from her and held it in place against his own neck. "It's just a scratch."

"You are not fine," Lisbon said shrilly.

"You're one to talk," he told her. "Cho, can't you go find someone to look at that arm of hers before she passes out from blood loss?"

Lisbon brushed Cho's offer to help her upstairs aside and addressed Jane once again. "I'm fine."

"So am I," he returned.

"Red John carved chunks out of your arms and almost slit your throat."

"Meh. Flesh wounds."

She closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against his chest for one brief, self-indulgent moment. "I'm glad you're all right."

He put his arms around her, gingerly, trying to be mindful of her injured arm. It hurt, but she didn't mind. She wrapped her good arm around him and pulled him closer.

Belatedly, she remembered that he probably had a couple of cracked ribs where Red John had hit him earlier, but when she moved to let him go, he only held her tighter.

Rigsby burst in then, the SWAT team hard on his heels. "Grace?" he called frantically from the top of the stairs. "You okay? We heard a shot."

"Down here, Wayne," Grace called back, still at the foot at the opposite staircase with her gun held loosely in her hand. "Red John's dead."

"You're not hurt?"

"I'm fine."

"Thank God."

"We're fine, too, Rigsby," Jane called. "Thanks for asking."

Lisbon extricated herself from Jane's arms and told Rigsby to call off the SWAT team and get started on finding out what he could about the bodies upstairs.

She spared a glance at the body of the man who had inflicted so much damage on so many. Flesh wounds, Jane had said. It wasn't true. She knew that some of the wounds this man had caused had cut to the bone.

Never again, though; his perfect features were marred by a neat round hole in the center of his forehead.

"That was a hell of a shot," Cho said to Van Pelt, who had holstered her weapon and joined them.

"Thanks."

"You could have killed Jane," Lisbon said reproachfully, not sure whether she wanted to deck Van Pelt for her recklessness or hug her for finally bringing the nightmare to an end.

Van Pelt didn't respond. "Let me see your neck," she said to Jane.

Jane lowered the handkerchief and tilted his head to allow Van Pelt to see the wound. The blood had already started to clot. The wound was long and thin but didn't seem to have hit anything major.

Van Pelt produced a tiny bottle of antiseptic solution and a roll of medical gauze from the pockets of her Kevlar vest. "Did you know I trained as a medic for awhile?" she said conversationally as she began dressing the wound.

Lisbon blinked. She had known that, of course. It was in her file, and everyone on the team had been going to Grace for treatment of minor injuries sustained on the job for years. But she didn't see what that had to do with nearly killing Jane in the cross fire. "So?"

"I worked my way through school as an EMT," Grace continued. "There are two main places in the neck which cause major blood loss – here, and here," she said, touching each side of her neck in turn. "Red John was holding the knife here." She gestured to a place lower on her neck.

"What's your point?" Lisbon said stiffly.

"Red John was bluffing. He didn't want to kill Jane."

"It sure looked like he planned to take him out with him to me," Lisbon said incredulously.

"No. He didn't want him dead—he was just trying to use him to escape." Van Pelt finished wrapping Jane's neck and turned her attention to Lisbon. She ripped her sleeve where the knife had entered and doused the wound thoroughly with antiseptic solution before pressing a thick wad of gauze against her torn skin, which was bleeding copiously. "That's all I can do for now," she told Lisbon. "You're going to need stitches for that."

"Why do you think he didn't want to kill him? I get using him as a hostage, but he had him here for hours. Why didn't he just kill him when he had the chance?" Cho asked.

"I think he was lonely. Jane was the closest thing he had to a friend."

Cho snorted. "Some friend. Jane'd sworn to kill him."

Van Pelt shrugged. "Comrade, then. He was the only person who was capable of stimulating him at an intellectual level."

Jane was nodding along to her words. "Very astute, Grace. You're right of course. I don't know about friendship, per se, but I'm inclined to agree with you that I provided him amusement, at least."

Lisbon was silent. She'd suspected something along those lines for years, and had told Jane as much when she'd warned him that Red John was trying to form a closer relationship with him, but he'd never given any indication that he agreed with her assessment until now.

"I'm sorry," Van Pelt said to Jane. "I know you wanted to be the one to do it."

"It's all right," he told her. He touched the bandage at his neck. "Under the circumstances, I'm grateful you were there to finish the job. I got to be an instrument of his downfall; I shall have to be content with that."

"You know I had some right to do it, too, don't you?" Van Pelt asked him.

"You think so?" Jane said lightly.

"I didn't lose what you lost, but he did take something from me."

"Yes, a murderous fiancé," Jane said dryly. "I'm not sure that gives you quite the same claim on revenge as me, but I can see how you could be upset about Red John causing the loss of such a catch."

"At least what you had was real. He turned my life into a lie," Van Pelt said bitterly.

Jane's expression softened. "I understand, Grace. I know I don't have a monopoly on suffering at Red John's hand."

"So we're okay?" Van Pelt asked.

Jane nodded. "We're okay."

"Well, I say, good for you," Cho said to Van Pelt. "I'm glad he's dead."

Lisbon didn't say anything. She was glad he was dead, too. She didn't like that about herself, that she could be pleased about the death of any human being, but it was true. She was just so unspeakably relieved it was over, and yes, relieved that they would never have to worry about him breaking out of jail and hurting anyone else. Or—worse, in some ways—Jane breaking into jail and killing him and her having to arrest him for murder.

Jane turned to her. "How about you, Lisbon?"

"How about me, what?" Lisbon said, alarmed. She knew Jane wasn't really psychic, but he was inconveniently perceptive and she hoped he hadn't read her thoughts on her face.

"Do you forgive Van Pelt for putting me in danger?"

Lisbon wasn't willing to give in so easily. She didn't care where the knife had been, the fact was that it had been pressed against Jane's neck, and if Red John had cut him any more deeply, Jane would have died. "Hmph."

Van Pelt looked crestfallen, but said bravely, "I don't regret it. I'd do it again, if I had the choice."

"You took a terrible risk," Lisbon said to Van Pelt severely.

"I know. But I knew I could make the shot and I truly was about ninety-five percent certain that if I did it, Jane wouldn't die."

Jane laughed out loud. "You can hardly ask for better odds than that, Lisbon," he said to her. "I think you'd better forgive her."

Van Pelt turned to her hopefully. Ugh, how was she supposed to stay mad at those eager puppy eyes? She really was the biggest sucker on the planet. She didn't need to let the rest of them know that, however.

"We should go upstairs," she said abruptly. "Jane will need to go to the hospital to have a doctor thoroughly check him over. Cho, you and Grace stay here and process the scene. Rigsby and local PD can help once they're done upstairs. We'll touch base after, okay?"

Van Pelt nodded, eyes downcast.

Oh, just hell. Unwilling to capitulate completely, she compromised by awkwardly patting Van Pelt on the shoulder. "Good work tonight," she said grudgingly. "Thanks for having our backs."

"Anytime," Van Pelt said seriously.

Lisbon sighed inwardly. In for a penny, in for a pound. "It really was a hell of a shot," she admitted.

Grace turned red. "Thanks, Boss."

"Wonderful," Jane said. "We're all friends again. Now that we have that out of the way, shall we get out of this hell hole and find someone who can stitch Lisbon up before she passes out from blood loss?"

They trooped upstairs, Lisbon and Jane both shaking off offers of assistance from the other members of the team.

"Excuse me," Lisbon called to the first paramedic she saw once they were above ground and outside again. She gestured to Jane. "This man needs medical attention."

"Oh, don't be so overdramatic, Lisbon. I'm perfectly all right. Don't listen to her," he told the paramedic. "She's the one who needs medical attention. She's lost a lot of blood."

"Red John used your arms for carving practice."

"I told you, they're just flesh wounds."

"Both of you need to go to the hospital," the paramedic said firmly. "You can ride together, if you like," he offered magnanimously, sensing he was in store for further resistance. He gestured to the waiting ambulance.

They both eyed the ambulance with distaste, then looked at each other and bowed to the inevitable. "Ladies first," Jane said, gesturing for Lisbon to precede him.

Ridiculous man. Lisbon sniffed haughtily and made a show of walking to the ambulance with dignity. As she passed the paramedic, she muttered to him, "If he doesn't get in after me, tell one of my agents to taser him. They can toss him in the rig and tie him to the defibrillator machine if they have to."

The taser didn't end up being necessary, however, because Jane climbed in willingly enough under his own power once she was safely ensconced in the back of the emergency vehicle.

Much to both of their annoyance, the paramedics insisted on strapping them each to a gurney. Once they were both settled and an initial assessment of their wounds had been conducted, the paramedics pretty much left them alone, having determined that their injuries would be better treated in the hospital setting. The ambulance driver turned on the sirens and the vehicle departed without further fanfare.

Once they were moving, Jane closed his eyes in the attitude Lisbon recognized as the one he adopted when feigning sleep. After a moment, he extended one hand halfway between them in a clear invitation, his eyes still closed.

Lisbon hesitated, but she reached out with her good arm and grasped the hand Jane was offering with her own.

No more was said on the way to the hospital, but they held hands the whole way there.


	13. Chapter 13

Much to Lisbon's chagrin, the doctor insisted on keeping her at the hospital overnight. She didn't see why this was necessary for a little scratch on the arm, but the doctor proved intractable on this point. The truth was, she'd been so preoccupied with her thoughts that she'd barely noticed what the doctor was doing, let alone what he was saying. When she protested, he cited some nonsense about blood loss and severed muscle tissue. In addition, she'd been so quiet while he stitched her up that he apparently became convinced she was suffering from some sort of shock. By the time she roused herself sufficiently from her contemplations to argue the point, it was too late.

At first, she was busy worrying about Jane. How was he taking it all? He'd acted blasé when Grace had asked him, but he had to be experiencing some pretty significant emotional turmoil. The task he'd set himself almost nine years ago was over, completed by someone else, no less. No matter what he said to Grace, she couldn't believe he didn't feel conflicted, at the very least. She was hardly inclined to take his word on the subject. After all, he'd never been one to share his true emotions easily with a group, even if it was made up of the people he was closest to.

Maybe now he would finally get the closure he'd been seeking. She hoped he could grieve properly for his family now at last. Maybe he'd move on. Get a new job. A new life. It seemed likely. What did he have to stay for, now that the hunt for Red John was over? She couldn't bear thinking about this for long, however, so she turned her worrying efforts to something far more pressing.

Red John had tortured him. He'd had Jane for three hours, and God only knew what he'd done to him during that time. The physical would be easy enough to suss out- the cuts on his arms were the most obvious markers, and Lisbon wouldn't be surprised if he had at least one or two broken ribs, but she was far more concerned about the specific brand of poison Red John had been dripping into Jane's ear for those hours when they'd been alone.

And then there were the marks on his arms inflicted by his own hand. This latter was most disturbing to her. Why had he done that? He'd implied it was part of his plan to lure Red John, but could he really have done that to himself? No matter what he said about it being part of a grander scheme, the truth was that cutting behavior was a classic cry for help, an indication that some dark thing on the inside was prompting self-destructive behavior.

She'd always known, in a place deep down and ruthlessly unacknowledged, that Jane had the capacity for self-harm. She'd seen glimpses, over the years, of the part of himself he normally kept hidden from others- the guilt and self-loathing that she knew made up far more of his emotional composition than anyone might guess on first acquaintance.

Only the thing was, why had he exercised that instinct now, of all times? Everyone she'd come across seemed convinced that he'd tried to kill himself because he was so distraught over her death that he couldn't bear to live anymore. Even her own team seemed to have bought into this idea. Which was ridiculous, because they'd known that she was alive the whole time, and so had Jane.

So why had he done it? What was the point of that elaborate charade? What had he hoped to accomplish by sitting around and pretending to be heartbroken over her death rather than lift a finger to escape? As far as she could see, all he'd managed to do was get himself kidnapped and tortured by his mortal enemy for his trouble.

She sat up abruptly, realization dawning. That was it. Red John had said it himself, only she'd been too hyped up on fear and adrenaline to take in the meaning of his words at the time, with all of her focus centered on keeping Jane alive. He'd tricked Red John into breaking him out of jail. On purpose.

She was going to kill him.

xxx

Jane sneaked into her room not half an hour later, bearing pastries. He had a bear claw for her and a blueberry muffin for himself.

"Hello, Lisbon," he said cheerfully.

She scowled at him. If the bastard thought he could get back into her good graces with one measly bear claw after what he'd done, he had another think coming.

"You look well," Jane said. "I've been given a clean bill of health, just in case you were wondering. No broken ribs, since I know you've been worrying about that. The neck thing was superficial, just like I told you. Worst I had to deal with was a few stitches on the arms, so I'll be good as new in no time. I confess I was rather concerned when I heard you were being kept here overnight, but when I spoke to your doctor he assured me it was merely a precaution. I had to tell him I was your husband to get him to tell me anything about your condition, by the way, so if he asks, we've been married for five years and have two dogs, Fluffy and Dwayne."

Lisbon turned her head away from him, in no mood for his nonsense at a time like this.

Jane, paragon of perception that he was, realized that she was upset. He assessed the line of tension in her shoulders and the unhappy protrusion of her lower lip. "You're mad at me," he observed.

She was silent.

"Come now, my dear. We've just crossed through the gates of hell together. This is hardly the time for the cold shoulder."

She supposed he had a point, but she wasn't quite ready to let him off the hook.

"Hm. Something big, then," he said, watching her closely. "Well, there's no point keeping it bottled up inside. Go on, let it all out, Lisbon. You're dying to let me have it, I can see it. Go right ahead. I can take it. Tell me what's troubling you."

God, the man was infuriating.

Fine. He wanted her to let him have it, she would let him have it. Unable to take his smug grin for one second longer, she burst out, "You planned this all along. You planned for Red John to kidnap you all along."

He blinked. "Well, yes."

"I could kill you with my bare hands right now."

"Seems kind of wasteful, after all that effort you went to to rescue me," he remarked.

"Van Pelt rescued you," she snapped.

"Van Pelt killed Red John," he corrected her. "Who found the GPS?"

"I did," she admitted grudgingly.

He spread his hands. "If you hadn't found the GPS, then you wouldn't have known where to go, and I'd probably still be in Red John's clutches. Ergo, you rescued me."

"That's not the point!"

"What is the point?"

"The point is, we had a plan, and you almost ruined my whole idea by going rogue at the end and almost getting yourself killed."

"Well, actually, it was my idea."

Her jaw dropped in indignation. "Like hell it was! It was my plan from the start! Your plan was to run away and hope for a flash of genius, which, by the way, was never going to come."

"Yes, but you stole the idea from me."

"I didn't steal anything. It was my idea, plain and simple."

"Please, it was my idea to pretend to kill you to trick Rachel when she kidnapped me a couple of years ago. You obviously got the idea from that."

"I did not! First of all, that plan didn't even work- she almost killed us, remember? Secondly, you think you were the first person to think of faking a death? It's practically in the public domain!"

"Aha, so you admit that it wasn't your original idea!"

"All I'm saying is, I was the one who came up with the plan to fool Red John."

"The first part, maybe. I was the one who came up with the part that actually led us to him."

"Getting kidnapped? That was your brilliant plan?"

"Also, hiding the GPS device for you to find."

"How the hell did you get that GPS into the prison, anyway?"

"That was the easiest part. I just put it into the guard's pocket when they were searching me, and kept moving it to the pocket of whichever guard had custody of me until I got to my room. I'm telling you, Lisbon, you should look into taking some kind of pickpocket's correspondence course, or something. You never know when the skill is going to come in handy."

She ignored this. "What about the tracker? How'd you keep Red John from finding it?"

"Actually, that idea I did get from you," he admitted.

"What do you mean?"

"That one time, you were yelling at me…"

She smirked. "That one time?"

He ignored her. "I asked you how you knew where I was. It turned out that Grace had ratted me out, but you said you had sewn tiny GPS devices into all my suits."

She eyed his clothes. He was back in one of his trademark suits, the prison garb long gone. "You actually sewed a GPS device into your suit?"

"Of course not. I was in prison- I didn't have any of my suits at hand. Besides, I wasn't sure when he would take me, and I really couldn't sew a GPS device into all my articles of clothing. Besides, even if I had, he might have taken it away. Like those ruffians who took my shoes that time," he said, looking more put out at the memory of his stolen shoes than the idea of Red John wresting a tracking device from him.

"Then how—"

"Subcutaneous tracker," he said succinctly.

"You had a GPS device embedded into your skin?" Lisbon said incredulously.

"Sure, why not? Baby seals have it done all the time. Can't lose it that way."

"But where…?" Lisbon trailed off, not sure she wanted to know the answer to her question.

He grinned. "Nowhere unmentionable, I assure you, Lisbon. I had the guy put it in my armpit. Brilliant, right? Who would think to check someone's armpit for something like that?"

"You're nuts," she said flatly.

"Not to worry, Lisbon, I had the doctor take it out after he bandaged my arms, so don't get your hopes up that you'll be able to track me that way in the future."

"I can't believe you didn't tell me what you were doing."

"Well, the GPS in the armpit was hardly the most dignified element of the scheme, Lisbon. You can hardly blame me for not shouting from the rooftops that I had someone embed a foreign object into my skin in such a sensitive location."

She shook her head. "I thought we were in this together."

"We were."

"So why didn't you tell me your plan?"

He raised his eyebrows. "You did tell me you would leave the details of my escape from jail to me."

"I didn't think you'd interpret that as license to manipulate your mortal enemy into kidnapping and torturing you," Lisbon said, exasperated.

"You should have been more specific, then."

"You should have told me," she said stubbornly.

"Don't be ridiculous, Lisbon. Of course I couldn't tell you. You'd never have agreed to it."

"Of course I wouldn't have! It was an insane, dangerous, *stupid* plan."

"I rest my case. If I'd suggested it, you'd have chained yourself to me and we never would have been able to convince Red John you were dead."

"Jane." Her tone was weary, signaling that she was reaching the end of her patience.

He sighed. "What's really bothering you, Lisbon?"

She looked down. "You put yourself in danger, Jane. You hurt yourself, and let Red John take you without any regard for your own well-being."

"It was the only way, Lisbon."

"I'm sorry, Jane, but that's just not true. There are a thousand different ways you could have played this, and—"

"I needed to stick with what works," he interrupted her.

"With what works?" she repeated.

"Yes. What works for us is that I stir things up, and then you come and bail me out when things go sour. All I needed to do was get into deep enough trouble, leave a trail of breadcrumbs, and then you would come rescue me."

"And meanwhile, it's no problem if a deranged killer slices your flesh to ribbons?" Lisbon said incredulously.

He shrugged. "You know I believe the price of any pain I could suffer was worth it to catch Red John."

"You gouged your own arms!" Lisbon said.

"And it worked, didn't it?"

She didn't bother dignifying this with a response. She shook her head. "I don't understand. You manipulated him into taking you so you could finally find him. But why didn't you just kill him instead of letting him cut you up? That's what you've always wanted, isn't it? To get your revenge?"

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Well, he was the one with the knife."

She brushed this aside as though it was of no import. "You manipulated him into breaking you out of jail. You could have lifted a weapon along the way if you'd really wanted to."

"Ah, but he would have anticipated an attack. He'd have expected me to come after him with a gun, and would have planned for it. And if I'd tried some other kind of weapon, he would have just taken it from me and used it against me."

"Which is why it was an insane, dangerous, *stupid* plan that could have gotten you ki-"

He cut her off. "Lisbon, what did Red John enjoy more than anything?"

"Killing women in sadistic ways?" Lisbon offered.

"Okay, but causing me pain was a close second, right?"

"I suppose."

"So, the brilliant part of the plan was to make him think that I wanted to die. Then he would do everything in his power to deny me that relief. Keeping me alive would allow me to continue to suffer."

She looked away. "Right."

Realization dawned. "Wait—don't tell me you thought I was really suicidal."

"What the hell was I supposed to think? I figured it out eventually, but when I first heard about it, yeah, I thought you might have finally gone off the deep end. You cut your own arms with a ballpoint pen, for God's sake."

"Oh, please. You don't think that if I really wanted to kill myself I could have thought of about a hundred faster and less painful ways to do it?"

Lisbon wasn't convinced. "Everyone who saw you, you know, after, seemed to think you really were a danger to yourself."

He looked at her sharply. "I had to act as though you'd really died, Lisbon. That part of the plan, we agreed on."

This didn't set well with Lisbon. "You're saying that's how you'd act, if I died?"

Jane didn't seem to think there was anything significant about this admission. "Well, certainly, I would have been extremely distraught if I had really accidentally killed you. Naturally, I drew from that feeling as I perpetuated the scheme against Red John."

She reached out and took one of his arms in her hands, turning it over to examine the damage. It was wrapped in bandages from wrist to elbow. "I was scared for you," she said quietly.

"I was scared for you, too," he said simply. "That was why I had to do it."

She let go of his arm. "Don't ever do that to me again."

"I won't," he said solemnly. "I swear I will never pretend to try kill myself to trick my archnemesis into kidnapping me again, Lisbon."

She rolled her eyes. "Very funny."

"I had to end it, Lisbon," he said, serious now. "I couldn't bear you being in danger. As long as he believed me broken, you were safe. This," he said, gesturing to his bandaged arms, "was a small price to pay for that assurance."

Lisbon couldn't think of anything to say in response to that.

"It's late," Jane remarked. He leaned forward and pressed a tender kiss to her forehead. "Sleep, Teresa."

She slept.


	14. Chapter 14

When she woke up, Jane was still there, sleeping in a chair next to her bed with his arms crossed and his chin dipping down to his chest.

Her heart clenched painfully in her chest. He was still there. She didn't know if he was going to disappear to God knows where tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, but he'd stayed with her all night, and the fact that he was there with her now meant more than she could say.

She watched him for a moment, her eyes greedily cataloguing the glints of gold in his hair, the length of his eyelashes resting against his cheek, and the shadow along his jaw, wondering if she'd ever have another opportunity to drink in the sight of his beautiful, dear face.

He woke up before she'd had long to indulge in her study of his elegant figure, almost as though he could feel the intensity of her scrutiny like a tangible thing. He gave her a wide, sleepy smile. "Morning."

"Morning," she returned, trying not to look as though she'd been staring at him like he was a tall glass of water in front of a woman dying of thirst.

"How are you feeling?"

"Much better, thanks. You?"

He stretched lazily in his chair. "Fit as a fiddle."

Relieved that he didn't seem to suspect the direction of her thoughts for once, she turned to another pressing matter. She shot him an appraising look. "Think you're up for a new scheme today?"

He raised his eyebrow at her. "What did you have in mind?"

"Think you can spring me from this joint?"

He looked affronted. "Lisbon, after all we've been through together, how can you insult my abilities by asking such a thing?"

"Jane. Less bragging, more scheming."

He gave her an arch look. "I'm going to remember you said that."

And then he was gone.

Twenty minutes later, they were standing outside the hospital, waiting for Cho to pick them up.

Lisbon glanced at him next to her, then looked away.

He looked at her, amused. "Yes?"

She studied the tops of her shoes. "I didn't say anything."

"Something's on your mind. What is it?"

"Nothing."

Good Lord, she was a terrible liar. "Just tell me."

She met his eyes. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Lisbon. I told you, Red John didn't want to hurt me. Well-" he paused. "He didn't want to kill me, anyway, so I'm not too badly off, considering."

"No, I mean about… you know, about Red John being gone. I expected you to be more…" she trailed off.

"Of an emotional basket case?" Jane finished for her.

"Yes," she admitted.

Jane shrugged. "He's dead. I got what I wanted."

"And now you're suddenly all right? Just like that?" Lisbon said incredulously.

He sighed. "It's not a magic wand. Red John dying didn't immediately make me one hundred percent happy. But we did what I set out to do. I'm relieved it's finally over, and I'm grateful that we all made it out of the final confrontation alive. To be honest, at the moment, that feels pretty damn good."

She stared at him. "You're really okay?"

He looked back at her. "The important thing is, now I know I will be."

She looked at him closely. He did look as though a great burden had been lifted from him. That was good. That was so, so good. She decided to take him at his word, and found herself having to blink back tears of relief. "And you're not mad at Van Pelt?" she double-checked.

"I'm not mad at Van Pelt," he confirmed.

"Because you say that now, but I don't want to have to deal with you playing some horrible prank on her later to get back at her for stealing your chance at revenge," Lisbon persisted.

"I'm not angry at Grace. You were right about the plan, in the end. Trusting in other people was my one great advantage against Red John. That was the one thing he couldn't anticipate, because he couldn't understand it. I know it was a long time coming, but I learned the key lesson in the end. I couldn't have done it without you. All of you."

"Well, I'm really-" shocked, in disbelief—"glad that you feel that way," she finished.

He smiled at her. "Now that we've settled that, is there anything else I can do to put your mind at ease? I'm at your disposal, Lisbon."

She hesitated.

He caught her look. "What?"

She shifted uncomfortably. "It's nothing. It's just- if you're interested in sticking around, I have an idea of something you might find interesting."

"Of course I'm sticking around," Jane said, sounding genuinely surprised. "Where else would I go?"

She fidgeted. "I don't know. I just thought, now that Red John's dead…"

He took her hand to stop it from fidgeting and squeezed it gently. "You thought I'd have no interest in staying, now that my quest for revenge has been realized?" he guessed.

"Well…yeah."

He looked into her eyes. "I'm interested, Lisbon. I'm not going anywhere."

She blushed furiously, annoyed at herself for the way her heart flipped in her chest at the way he was looking at her while he held her hand and annoyed at him for twisting everything around to make their conversation intimate and personal instead just giving her a simple answer to a cool and professional inquiry about his future plans. "Oh. Well-good."

Okay, so maybe she had a tiny bit of personal interest in his plans.

"Unless you don't want me around anymore?" he said, goading her.

She glared at him and yanked her hand away. "Stop fishing."

He grinned, unrepentant. "What is it that you think I'll find so interesting?"

She tried to steer the conversation back on course. "This isn't over, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"Red John still has a group of followers out there, and if any of them helped him kill anyone, I mean to round them up and have them thrown in jail."

"How do you propose we find them, now that Red John's dead?"

"I think I have an idea about that," Lisbon said, thinking of a man who had once called her 'more beautiful than advertised.' She'd found the phrasing of the compliment odd at the time, but it seemed even stranger that the choice of words had been echoed by Red John himself.

"Do tell," he said, intrigued.

"Remember what Red John said when he first saw me in his basement?"

Jane frowned. "He said he wasn't surprised to see you alive. He was lying, though. He would have taken you, if he'd known."

"He said I wasn't as dead as originally advertised," Lisbon corrected him.

"And?"

"And Brett Stiles said almost the exact same thing to me once."

His frowned deepened. "Brett Stiles thought you were dead?"

"No."

"Then what—"

"It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it," Lisbon said impatiently.

"I'm afraid I'm not quite following."

"The phrase he used. It wasn't a common phrase."

"So?"

"So, all Red John's followers longed to be like him, to please him. What if that desire to emulate him encompassed more than just his murderous impulses? What if his closest followers started to adopt his mannerisms, the way he talked?"

Jane looked skeptical. "Seems a bit thin."

"I know it's not much to go on, but I think it's worth looking into," Lisbon said defensively.

"No need to be offended, Lisbon. I'm just saying, it sounds like a bit of a long shot."

She looked at him incredulously. "*You're* the one who suddenly isn't willing to try something a little outside the box just because it's a long shot?"

He raised his eyebrows at her. "Did I say I wasn't willing?"

The man was infuriating. "Whatever. Do you want to help, or not?" Lisbon said irritably.

He smiled at her. "With pleasure, my dear. With pleasure."


	15. Chapter 15

A/N: This is it, last chapter! Thanks so much for following along for the ride, especially all you amazing reviewers out there. You guys are awesome.

xxx

At Lisbon's request, the FBI transferred the Red John case back to her team. Wainwright smoothed it over, agreeing to give the FBI partial credit for bringing down Red John by citing 'cross-agency collaboration' as a key element of the plot that had ultimately resulted in his downfall, even though (as Jane said rather indignantly), technically, the FBI hadn't contributed so much as a single lead to the case in the scant week they'd had ownership of it. The FBI had agreed readily to this compromise, recognizing this was their only real hope of claiming any share of the glory, since it could hardly be denied that it was the CBI that had ultimately found Red John and brought about his demise. Besides, from the FBI's perspective, now that the key figure in the case had been killed, there wasn't much to be gained by fighting to keep hold of it except a lot of tedious follow up work and paperwork. So they gave up the case willingly enough, and the SCU began the task of dismantling the final remains of Red John's empire.

It took them two months to take down Brett Stiles. The fact that they didn't know exactly what they were looking for had slowed them down a little bit, but having a clear idea of where to look, they just kept looking until they found it. It, in this case, being evidence that Brett Stiles had helped Red John kill at least four people, and had helped him recruit his helpers through the expansive reach of Visualize. It turned out that Stiles was the key to tracking down most of Red John's disciples – he'd been the primary recruiting agent, and was the only one who had a true sense of the extent of Red John's network. Visualize itself crumbled pretty quickly after Stiles was arrested, and they were able to track down thirteen more accomplices associated with the organization, plus another eighteen in various government agencies. Only a few of these individuals knew each other, but Stiles was able to provide their names and most recently known whereabouts for the promise of life in prison instead of a needle in his arm.

Lisbon made the last arrest herself. This was really because she happened to be on the scene when Rigsby had called her to tell her they'd finally connected some suspicious activity in some of Visualize's financials to the man they now knew to be Red John, but Jane said it was only fitting that she be the one to make the final arrest. This was nonsense, of course, but the rest of the team seemed to agree with him.

There had been a lot of press coverage over the death of Red John, and the CBI had gotten a lot of attention as a result of it. Jane figured prominently in many of the news stories, but it was not Lisbon, but Van Pelt who was cast in the role of heroine to his tragic hero. The media called her CBI's avenging angel, the brave agent who'd been deceived by a traitorous fiancé and then taken down Red John with a bullet between the eyes. Lisbon was glad for Grace, because she knew what a boon that kind of media attention could be for a young agent's career. The rest of the team, however, seemed to think Lisbon had been somehow cheated of her fair share of the credit for the plan that had ultimately resulted in Red John's downfall. Grace in particular felt guilty for 'stealing her thunder,' as she put it, but Lisbon assured her truthfully that she was just as glad not to be the poster girl for the media storm associated with this particular case. She didn't care who got the credit for taking Red John down, she was just glad it was over. She only hoped this meant that the 'St. Teresa' moniker would be retired at last. She'd always hated that nickname.

Still, she had to admit it felt good to make the arrest that – barring the emergence of any new evidence—would close the Red John case for good.

Two days later, she signed the final report with a satisfied flourish.

She looked over at Jane, reclining on her couch with his eyes closed in his standard attitude of repose, his hands folded on his chest and a half smile on his lips. He'd been spending a lot of time there lately, just as he had done during their great deception. She watched him for a moment, feeling a sudden rush of affection sweep over her at the sight of his familiar form. She was glad he'd decided to stay. She hadn't really allowed herself to acknowledge how afraid she'd been that he would just walk away, now that it was over, or how much she truly wanted him to stay, but now that two months had passed since Red John's death without Jane betraying any indication that he had the remotest inclination to leave, she was finally starting to let herself believe that he really wasn't going anywhere.

Her eyes traced over the golden lashes, the softly parted mouth... he had a beautiful mouth, she thought. More expressive than he was probably aware. Over time, she'd learned that his mouth tightened ever so slightly when he was angry or upset, even when he had his most bland poker face in place. She could even distinguish between his smiles, these days, though those had taken longer to master. He had several distinct ones. There was the classic charm smile, of course, which he used most frequently when trying to con someone into doing something that he wanted. She was more familiar with that one than she liked to admit, and she had to acknowledge that she wasn't entirely immune to it, even when she knew he was trying to manipulate her. There was the 'I'm pleased with my own brilliance' smile, which she usually longed to slap off his face for him. Then there was the one she liked even less, the vindictively pleased one that appeared when whichever murderer or similarly despicable criminal realized they'd been had by one of his schemes. But he also had one that seemed to be reserved for her. That one was a close cousin of the charm smile, but there was something a bit softer about that one. Something… happier.

She was probably kidding herself about that. Probably every woman he ever directed his charm smile to thought it was patented just for her. Still, there was no denying that the full lips had a particular power over her. She remembered the feeling of those lips pressed tenderly to the side of her neck and flushed at the recollection. She was unable to stop herself from wondering if they would feel as soft under her own mouth, if she were to take leave of her senses and walk over to the couch and press her lips to his to wake him.

Coming back to herself with a start, she realized that she'd been sitting there idly musing about what it would be like to kiss Patrick Jane for the better part of a minute and a half.

Alarmed by the trajectory of her own thoughts, she stood abruptly and fled for the break room to escape her own overactive imagination.

Cho was there, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "Hey, boss."

"Hey." She grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, with a vague thought that having something cool to drink might soothe her agitation.

Cho jerked his head towards her office. "Jane in there?"

"Yeah. Sleeping, for a change," she said with a roll of her eyes.

He looked at her with his usual stone-like expression. "When are you going to cut him a break?"

Lisbon paused with the water bottle halfway to her lips. "Excuse me?" She wasn't used to people accusing her of being too hard on Jane. If anything, no matter how much she yelled at him, most people seemed to think she was too lenient towards him.

"When are you going to give him a break?" Cho repeated.

"Well, I am letting him sleep on my couch," Lisbon said, disconcerted. What was Cho's problem? Suddenly it wasn't okay to make fun of Jane for sleeping at work?

"That's not what I mean."

"What *do* you mean?" she asked, now thoroughly perplexed.

"He's been trailing after you like a puppy for ages."

She choked on her water. "*What?* No, he hasn't," she spluttered.

"Yeah, he has. It's starting to get pathetic. You need to either throw the poor bastard a bone or tell him he's never going to get what he wants from you."

"What does he want from me?" Lisbon said, aghast.

"Love. Marriage. Twelve babies. How the hell should I know?"

"Jane and I aren't like that," Lisbon said weakly.

"I know you aren't. But you both want to be, so what's the hold up? I could understand it when Red John was alive, but he's out of the picture now. Haven't you wasted enough time?"

Lisbon opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out.

"Think about it," Cho said, and went back to his desk.

Lisbon retreated back to her office, forgetting that its current occupant was what had precipitated her escape from it in the first place until the door closed behind her and she was once again faced with the sight of Jane stretched out before her.

Without opening his eyes, he inquired, "Did you bring me any tea?"

It took a moment for her to recover, but she managed it before a too suspicious interval of time had passed. "Get your own damn tea," Lisbon huffed in a reasonable approximation of her most annoyed tone. She was rather proud of herself.

Jane, however, wasn't fooled. He opened his eyes and assessed her expression with a critical eye. "Hm," he said, standing up and stretching. He stepped towards her and peered at her closely, looking her up and down and then allowing his eyes to come to rest on her face as he gave her a long, searching look.

"What?" Lisbon said, feeling self-conscious.

"I was just wondering something," he said idly.

"What's that?" she asked irritably. He was standing entirely too close to her.

"Just wondering if you're ready."

"Ready for what?" she asked warily.

"Ready to move to the next stage of our relationship," he said, as though commenting on a topic as mundane as which sandwich shop they should go to for lunch.

She drew back. "What stage of our relationship?"

He gestured between them, unfazed by her stiffened posture and strained tone. "The one in which we finally admit our attraction to one another and more importantly, act on it."

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Were you eavesdropping on my conversation with Cho?" she demanded.

He stopped. "No. Why? Wait—don't tell me." He grinned. "Cho was pleading my case on my behalf?"

"No," she said unconvincingly.

He beamed at her. "Good old Cho. Glad to know I can count on him in matters of the heart. I'll have to send him a bottle of Scotch on our anniversary."

She raised her eyebrows. "When is your anniversary with Cho? I'll send you guys a card."

"Very funny. I was referring to *our* anniversary, yours and mine."

"We don't have an anniversary."

"Not yet," he agreed. "But I'm thinking about this time next year, we will."

"Yeah, right."

"So you're still insisting on denial, eh?" Jane shrugged. "You can deny it all you want, but we both know that you're attracted to me."

"I am not," Lisbon lied.

"Come now, you have to admit you've been thinking about what it would be like to kiss me more and more now that Red John is dead and I've proven to you that I have no intention of wandering off."

"No, I haven't," Lisbon said stoutly.

"Yes, you have," he said, noting her high color. Poor Lisbon. That Irish skin gave her away every time. "Just as I have."

"I told you, I have not—" she stopped. "As you have?"

"Of course. You're a very beautiful woman, Lisbon. I doubt there are many men of your acquaintance who haven't wondered at least once what it would be like to kiss you."

"Don't be ridiculous," she scoffed.

"I personally," he continued, as though she hadn't spoken, "have spent quite a bit of time pondering the subject."

She swallowed. "You have?"

He nodded. "I have. And you've been pondering much the same thing regarding yours truly, or you wouldn't have almost kissed me in the park that day before I pretended to shoot you."

"I didn't almost kiss you!" she spluttered. "You almost kissed me!"

"Who almost kissed who is irrelevant now," he said breezily. "The point is, we almost kissed, so it's ridiculous of you to continue denying that there is an attraction between us."

"Okay, so maybe there's an attraction," she acknowledged grudgingly. "That doesn't mean it's a good idea to act on it."

"Why ever not?"

"Don't you think this is a bit… sudden?"

"We've known each other for nine years, Lisbon. Glaciers move more quickly than you and I have."

"You know what I mean. Red John only died two months ago. You're still figuring out what you want. In those terms, it's not entirely unreasonable to think you might need some time."

"I beg to differ. I don't need time. In fact, I've been waiting for you to come around for awhile now."

"*You've* been waiting for me?" she said incredulously. "I'm not the one who's spent the better part of a decade mourning the loss of my wife and child as the result of a terrible tragedy."

"You're not the one who has spent the better part of a decade healing from that tragedy with a brave, caring, and not entirely unattractive agent of the California Bureau of Investigation by your side every step of the way," he corrected her.

She brushed this aside. "My point is, I'm not the one that needed to be waited for."

"Certainly, you were. I needed to wait for you to adjust to the fact that I wasn't going to leave after Red John died and to acknowledge to yourself that you'd like more from our relationship than platonic friendship."

"You've been waiting for me to acknowledge that to myself?"

"Yes, and I've been very patient. Frankly, I think it's a bit selfish of you to try to deny me what I want after I've waited so patiently. In fact, I should probably get a medal of some kind for the restraint I've shown."

"I'm denying you what you want, huh? What is that, exactly?"

"I'll settle for a kiss, to begin with."

"A kiss?" she echoed. Her palms were suddenly clammy. He seemed serious.

"Yes, Lisbon. A kiss. On the lips. Right here, right now."

"Now?" she squeaked.

"Now," he repeated firmly. He stepped closer to her, invading her personal space even more than usual, and bent his head halfway down to meet her, and then stopped, poised above her, but no longer moving closer.

She stared at him. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be waiting for some action from her. Did he seriously think that she was going to—

"Whenever you're ready," he said calmly, without opening his eyes.

"Jane," she said softly. "I'm not so sure this is a good idea."

"Fine," he said, but he didn't move from his expectant stance above her.

"You're not moving," Lisbon pointed out.

"Neither are you," he said, unfazed.

He had a point.

"Lisbon, it's entirely up to you," he said, his eyes still closed. "If you are not remotely interested in exploring this thing between us, if you have absolutely no curiosity about what it would be like if we kissed, then go ahead. Walk away. If you do, I'll never mention it again. I'll never flirt with you, never kiss you, never say I love you. If anything is going to happen between us, you've got to meet me halfway."

She scowled. Ever the manipulator. God, it figured he'd be just as insufferable about this as he was about everything else.

He continued to stand there, the lines of his face utterly free of tension, and that beautiful mouth just inches away from hers.

To hell with it. She rose up on her tiptoes to meet him and tentatively touched her lips to his.

He sighed into her mouth as though in relief, and kissed her back. All thoughts of reason, of caution, left Lisbon's head. Nothing mattered except getting closer to him. His hands wove into her hair and then one dropped to the small of her back, drawing her nearer. She leaned into him and her own hand found its way to the back of his neck, and soon they were devouring each other, unable to get close enough. Their stomachs and chests were pressed together, and they stood thigh to thigh, but it wasn't enough. They stumbled to the couch together, mouths still working frantically against one another.

Just before they fell upon on it together, Lisbon grabbed Jane by the vest and pushed him down first, climbing on top of him and attacking his mouth once again.

Then she stopped, looking down at him. His eyes were pools of black once again, his lips softly parted. And he seemed to be having a similar reaction as the last time she'd climbed on top of him.

"We seem to have been here before," Jane remarked, drawing his finger down her side.

"Just to be clear," Lisbon said, somewhat breathlessly, "we are NOT having sex in my office." And then she leaned down and kissed him again.

Jane arched up underneath her, dipping his head to press a long kiss to her exposed collarbone. Her shirt seemed to have become half unbuttoned somewhere along the line. "Thanks for clearing that up," he panted, seemingly unable to catch his own breath. He raised his head to kiss her again, drawing his fingers through the dark silk of her hair.

She leaned her head back and shivered slightly when he kissed the side of her neck. "I knew it," he murmured triumphantly.

"Knew what?" Lisbon said vaguely, unable to focus clearly when he was doing that to her neck.

"I knew you weren't faking it, before," he crowed, his smugness only slightly less unbearable because he was kissing his way down her neck and below with each word. "I knew you would never have agreed to pretend to be in a relationship with me to fool Red John unless what you were pretending to feel towards me was at least a little bit real."

Lisbon rolled her eyes despite herself. Apparently he was still just as capable of being a jackass as ever, even if he did kiss like a god. "You," she said, pausing to appreciate the truly exquisite sensation of his mouth moving down the soft skin of her chest, "are an idiot." If he wasn't, he'd have realized she wouldn't have gone after him in the first place if she hadn't been at least half in love with him even then.

"I was smart enough not pass up a chance to do this every chance I got, wasn't I?" he said, lifting his head to taste the smooth column of her neck again.

"Yes, you were very smart," Lisbon said indulgently, and bit him on the ear.

"I get the sense you are mocking me," he muttered, drawing her head back down for another long kiss.

"That's because you're very perceptive," she said, then deepened the kiss.

After a moment, she could feel him smiling into the kiss, and she frowned back into it. That wasn't his happy smile. It was his self-satisfied smile. "Now what are you smiling about?" she muttered against his lips.

His smile grew wider. "You."

She drew back. "What about me?" It seemed that this new phase of their relationship would be just as replete with suspicion as the previous one.

"Nothing, keep kissing me, woman."

She sat up. "Tell me."

He rested his hands on her hips and leaned forward to kiss the v of white skin just above her partially unbuttoned shirt. "Fine. Just… never go to Vegas, Lisbon."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" she demanded.

He raised his head and kissed a corner of her downturned mouth. "You believe every bluff anyone sells you."

She bit his lip in retaliation. "I do not."

"Oh, please," he said, licking his lip where she'd bitten him. "Like there was any chance in hell that I'd have let you walk away from me."

"What are you talking about?"

"That whole 'meeting me halfway thing?' A total con. I would have tricked, schemed, and lied to get closer to you if you'd tried to walk away. There was no way I was going to let you escape."

"Then why-?"

He interrupted her with another kiss. "Forty years from now, I want to be able to tell people how you initiated our first kiss of your own free will. That in fact, I was just standing there innocently when you basically threw yourself at me like the hoyden that you are."

She gasped in outrage. "You bastard!" She punched him in the arm, then kissed him again. "You're going to pay for that."

And then she climbed off him and calmly started buttoning up her shirt.

Jane sat up, alarmed. "What are you doing? It's just a joke! I'll tell people that I tricked you into kissing me, if you want."

He stood up, looking decidedly rumpled, and reached for her again. "I'll tell them that I hypnotized you and you weren't responsible for your own actions. Just come back to the couch."

She slapped his hands away. "I told you, Jane, we're not having sex in my office." She turned towards him and yanked him closer to her by with a tug on his belt.

Jane, master of biofeedback that he was, couldn't help being affected by this action that seemed to be in direct contradiction to her words. She smirked, and started buttoning up his shirt, in turn, which had also become unbuttoned. Jane watched her, feeling more turned on by her dressing him than he had been even when she'd been undressing him. Of course, that part had been a bit of a blur, focused as he'd been on other things, like cataloguing every sensation of her mouth against his in a new and much prized addition to the memory palace.

Belatedly, he realized that Lisbon was laughing at him.

"What is it?" he demanded.

"Nothing. Just thinking that maybe you should lay off the trips to Vegas, too."

"Why should I lay off the trips to Vegas? I could buy you a house with my winnings after three hours in Vegas," he boasted. Then he stopped, arrested by the image of himself doing just that. What kind of house would Lisbon want? Nothing too ostentatious, like his old mansion. Perhaps an old Victorian house. Old fashioned, but charming and somewhat romantic on the inside. He was so engaged in mentally remodeling this hypothetical house that he would buy for her that he almost didn't catch that she was talking again. He refocused.

"I don't think it's safe for you to go to Vegas," she was saying. "You could lose your shirt. Have you always been this much of a sucker?"

He froze. "What?" No one had ever called him a sucker before. He wasn't a sucker. He was the con man, the one who laughed and profited from the unsuspecting natures of the suckers.

She pulled a key ring out of her pocket and grinned. "Seriously, Jane. You let a total novice lift your keys just because a 'not entirely unattractive CBI agent' batted her eyelashes at you?"

Jane stared at his keys in her hand. "You pickpocketed me?" he said incredulously.

"Yup." She looked incredibly pleased with herself.

"Why?"

"I told you, Jane," she said patiently. "We are not having sex in this office." She patted him on the butt. "Come on, Paddy. I'm driving." She kissed him again, long and hard, and then sauntered out of her office without a backward glance.

He gave her a ten second head start, and then went after her.

xxx

The End.


End file.
